Git error Host Key Verification Failed when connecting to remote repository

Question

I am trying to connect to a remote Git repository that resides on my web server and clone it to my machine   I am using the following format for my command   git clone ssh   username domain com repository git   This has worked fine for most of my team members   Usually after running this command Git will prompt for the user s password  and then run the cloning   However  when running on one of my machines I get the following error      Host key verification failed        fatal  Could not read from remote   repository    We are not using SSH keys to connect to this repository  so I m not sure why Git is checking for one on this particular machine

User · Answer

Reason seems to be that the public key of the remote host is not stored or different from the stored one. (Be aware of security issues, see Greg Bacon's answer for details.)

I was used to git clone prompting me in this case:

The authenticity of host 'host.net (10.0.0.42)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is 00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00:00.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

Not sure, why this error is thrown instead. Could be the configuration of your shell or the git SSH command.
Anyhow, you can get the same prompt by running ssh [email protected].

User · Answer

For me  I just had to type  yes  at the prompt which asks  Are you sure you want to continue connecting  yes no    rather than just pressing Enter

User · Answer

I was facing the same error inside DockerFile during build time while the image was public  I did little modification in Dockerfile    RUN git clone  https   github com kacole2 express-node-mongo-skeleton git  www nodejs      This would be because using the git github com     syntax ends up   using SSH to clone  and inside the container  your private key is not   available  You ll want to use RUN git clone   https   github com edenhill librdkafka git instead

User · Answer

As I answered previously in Cloning git repo causes error - Host key verification failed  fatal  The remote end hung up unexpectedly  add the GitHub to the list of authorized hosts   ssh-keyscan -t rsa github com  gt  gt     ssh known hosts

User · Answer

I had the similar issue  unfortunately I used the GitExtensions HMI and forgot that I wrote a passphrase  With HMI     forget it   Do not enter passphrase when you generate your key

User · Answer

If you are in office intranet  otherwise dangerous  which is always protected by firewalls simply have the following lines in your    ssh config  Host     StrictHostKeyChecking no   UserKnownHostsFile  dev null

User · Answer

I had the similar issue  but  using SSH keys  From Tupy s answer  above  I figured out that the issue is with known hosts file not being present or github com not being present in the list of known hosts  Here are the steps I followed to resolve it -    mkdir -p    ssh ssh-keyscan -t rsa github com  gt  gt     ssh known hosts  ssh-keygen -t rsa -C  user email   open the public key with this command   cat    ssh id rsa pub and copy it   Add the id rsa pub key to SSH keys list on your GitHub profile

User · Answer

If you are using git for Windows    Open the git GUI  Open the local git repository in git GUI  Add the remote or push if the remote already exists  Answer  yes  to the question about whether you want to continue    The GUI client adds the key for you to    ssh known hosts  This is easier to remember if you don t do it often and also avoids the need to use the git command line  the standard Windows command lines don t have the ssh-keyscan executable

User · Answer

The solutions mentioned here are great  the only missing point is  what if your public and private key file names are different than the default ones  Create a file called  quot config quot  under    ssh and add the following contents Host github com     IdentityFile    ssh github id rsa  Replace github id rsa with your private key file

User · Answer

When the remote server wants to connect to the private repo  it would authenticate via ssh   Create the private-public key pair with ssh-keygen or if you already have the public-private key  copy amp paste the public key in the Settings of the private repo   YourPrivateRepo -  Settings -  Deploy Keys -  Add deploy key -  Paste the public key   Now the remote server would be able to connect to the private repo   NOTE  The deploy keys has access only for reading the repo  Need to explicitly allow write access

User · Answer

What worked for me was to first add my SSH key of the new computer  I followed these instructions from GitLab - add SSH key  Note that since I m on Win10  I had to do all these commands in Git Bash on Windows  it didn t work in regular DOS cmd Shell    Then again in Git Bash  I had to do a git clone of the repo that I had problems with  and in my case I had to clone it to a different name since I already had it locally and didn t want to lose my commits  For example   git clone ssh   git gitServerUrl myRepo git myRepo2   Then I got the prompt to add it to known hosts list  the question might be this one      Are you sure you want to continue connecting  yes no     I typed  yes  and it finally worked  you should typically get a message similar to this      Warning  Permanently added   your repo link    ECDSA  to the list of known hosts    Note  if you are on Windows  make sure that you use Git Bash for all the commands  this did not work in regular cmd shell or powershell  I really had to do this in Git Bash    Lastly I deleted the second clone repo  myRepo2 in the example  and went back to my first repo and I could finally do all the Git stuff like normal in my favorite editor VSCode

User · Answer

You are connecting via the SSH protocol  as indicated by the ssh    prefix on your clone URL  Using SSH  every host has a key  Clients remember the host key associated with a particular address and refuse to connect if a host key appears to change  This prevents man in the middle attacks   The host key for domain com has changed  If this does not seem fishy to you  remove the old key from your local cache by editing   HOME   ssh known hosts to remove the line for domain com or letting an SSH utility do it for you with  ssh-keygen -R domain com   From here  record the updated key either by doing it yourself with  ssh-keyscan -t rsa domain com  gt  gt     ssh known hosts   or  equivalently  let ssh do it for you next time you connect with git fetch  git pull  or git push  or even a plain ol    ssh domain com  by answering yes when prompted  The authenticity of host  domain com  a b c d   can t be established  RSA key fingerprint is XX XX     XX  Are you sure you want to continue connecting  yes no    The reason for this prompt is domain com is no longer in your known hosts after deleting it and presumably not in the system   s  etc ssh ssh known hosts  so ssh has no way to know whether the host on the other end of the connection is really domain com   If the wrong key is in  etc  someone with administrative privileges will have to update the system-wide file    I strongly encourage you to consider having users authenticate with keys as well  That way  ssh-agent can store key material for convenience  rather than everyone having to enter her password for each connection to the server   and passwords do not go over the network

User · Answer

You kan use https instead of ssh for git clone or git pull or git push ex  git clone https   github com user repo git

User · Answer

Its means your remote host key was changed  May be host password change    Your terminal suggested to execute this command as root user    ssh-keygen -f   root  ssh known hosts  -R  www website net    You have to remove that host name from hosts list on your pc server  Copy that suggested command and execute as a root user     sudo su                                                           Login as a root user    ssh-keygen -f   root  ssh known hosts  -R  www website net        Terminal suggested command execute here Host  www website net  4231 found  line 16 type ECDSA  root  ssh known hosts updated  Original contents retained as  root  ssh known hosts old    exit                                                              Exist from root user   Try Again  Hope this works

User · Answer

This is happening because github is not currently in your known hosts   You should be prompted to add github to your known hosts  If this hasn t happened  you can run ssh -T git github com to receive the prompt again

User · Answer

I got this message when I tried to git clone a repo that was not mine  The fix was to fork and then clone

User · Answer

I got the same problem on a newly installed system  but this was a udev problem  There was no  dev tty node  so I had to do   mknod -m 666  dev tty c 5 0

User · Answer

You can use your  git url  in  https  URL format in the Jenkinsfile or wherever you want   git url   https   github com jglick simple-maven-project-with-tests git

User · Answer

When asked   Are you sure you want to continue connecting  yes no    Type yes as the response  That is how I solved my issue  But if you try to just hit the enter button  it won t work

[git] Git error: "Host Key Verification Failed" when connecting to remote repository

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