Pushing from GIT to Heroku

Posted by on May 30, 2014 in Cloud, Other

Pushing from GIT to Heroku

I recently attempted to publish a small node.js application from my local machine under source control using git, to Heroku (http://www.heroku.com). While this should have been as simple as entering:

I was met with the error:

Permission denied (publikey)
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Public key issues are never good

Public key issues are never good – even less so when the error message is prefixed with ‘fatal’ 😉

The error message seemed quite clear and explicit – it seems that my local public key didn’t match that on Heroku and thus I could not authenticate.

To resolve this I deleted the existing public key in my .ssh folder (located at c:\users\\.ssh\ and generated a new one. From a command prompt:

when prompted for the path I put in the path to the .ssh folder as follows:

Enter the file in which to save the key: c:\users\lee\.ssh\id_rsa

I left the password blank as this is a private machine and I’m too lazy to re-enter the pass-phrase every session. This generated a new key for me.

Adding to the local key store

From there I needed to add the key into the local git keystore. This is needed to ensure that both Git and eventually Heroku, are using the exact same key. To accomplish this open up a bash shell (after you’ve installed git for windows you can right click any folder and select ‘Git Bash’) and enter:

note the back-tick (above the tab key!) not apostrophe’s and also notice the eval statement. ssh-agent alone will not work

Assuming you didn’t rename your key when generating (id_rsa), ssh-add will look for the default key name in the default key path. If you did change the file name you’ll need to pass this in as a parameter. If it worked, you should be prompted with:

Identity added: /c/Users/lee/.ssh/id_rsa

Sync the keys with Heroku

Now you have a brand new key added into your local git you can start migrating this to Heroku. If you have no other keys in Heroku, run the following commands from a command prompt:

Assuming all went well and the output of the last step was:

Uploading SSH public key …done

then you should be good to go.

Executing

should show your newly created and uploaded key.

Ready, set, go!

Finally,

should now succeed and you’re good to go!