[SOLVED] Can't push to github (openssh-askpass fails to authenticate)

Question

Greetings
I am having trouble pushing to github. I have added my public key to github
and checked that it works using
ssh -T [email protected]
When I try to use git to do a git push origin master I get a password prompt
dialog from openssh-askpass. I tried removing openssh-askpass but it seems
there is not fallback as I get an error of it missing.
There are two dialogs that pop up and I think they don't do the same thing
even though they both ask the same thing viz "enter your ssh passphrase"
I think the first one is actually asking for my username and the second one
is the passphrase. I have tried entering "git" as a username, my github
username and my passphrase as instructed and this all fails to authenticate.
I also can't find where the logs are for openssh. I did
tail -f /var/log/*
and nothing changes while try to login.
Is there a configuration for git to use openssh-askpass which was added
that I missed?
Which logs should I be looking at?
Last edited by lunamystry (2012-09-07 12:26:49)

Answer 1

This is my solution which seems to work:
After web searching the error I got, I found that there is an environment
variable GIT_ASKPASS and SSH_ASKPASS which launch whatever you tell
them to get the passphrase.
GIT_ASKPASS is not set by default and git calls SSH_ASKPASS instead.
One of them has to be set otherwise git (and I assume ssh if SSH_ASKPASS
is not set) will not use the passphrase but  will prompt for the password.
The password in my case was the github password. I installed ksshaskpass
because I am on KDE and that removed ssh_askpass and integrates with
KWallet. Here are the commands I used in case the above was not clear:
export SSH_ASKPASS=""
sudo pacman -S ksshaskpass
export GIT_ASKPASS="/usr/bin/ksshaskpass"
cd Projects/Scripts/
git push origin master
You obviously don't need the last two commands.