Setting up SSH to GitHub git clone into your Oracle Cloud Linux Ubuntu VM with VNC

by

I’m trying to be as succinct as possible. I just accomplished this but couldn’t find anything that explicitly walked me through how to do it. Here are some assumptions:

  • You have followed these instructions for Installing Flask on an Ubuntu Virtual Machine (VM) in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure1
  • You at least have a Free Tier account in OCI
  • You have an existing GitHub account
  • You’re already or presently signed into (via SSH presumably) your Linux Virtual Machine (like I am in the images you’ll soon see)
  1. I suppose you don’t need anything related to Flask or Python; you need to follow the steps to the point where you need to git clone something in your Virtual Machine (aka your Compute Instance). ↩︎
REMINDER: You are signed in to a Linux machine! The commands you will follow (in GitHub or here) WILL NEED TO BE FOR LINUX!

What happened?

I am trying to clone an already existing repository in my Virtual Machine.

I received the following fatal: Authentication failed for... error when attempting to authenticate with GitHub from within my Virtual Machine with my GitHub username and password:

Epic failure when trying to sign in using your username and password.

Authenticating with SSH

Since the HTTPS method of authenticating doesn’t work, the next available option is to clone via SSH.

Even if you don’t know what this means, as long as you follow the Linux instructions in the GitHub documentation, you’ll be fine. First, you’ll want to check to see if you have existing SSH keys in your Linux VM (spoiler: you won’t, at least not for GitHub).

Next, follow the Linux instructions for generating new SSH keys.

Then, add your PRIVATE key (NOT your public key) to your SSH agent (don’t even ask me what the hell an SSH agent is, isn’t, or does). I presume the SSH agent assists in authentication.

Finally, add your Public key to GitHub. They’ve provided instructions here, but I have included some screenshots of what this looks like when done for your OCI VM.

Navigate to settings
Next, click SSH and GPG keys
Add your public SSH key with your email, too!

Once you’ve saved it, you can use it git pull from within your OCI VM. As can be seen here:

And that’s all for now. I mostly wrote this blog out of sheer frustration. Please share it with your friends and bookmark it for future use!

Follow

And don’t forget to follow, like, subscribe, share, taunt, troll, or stalk me!

2 thoughts on “Setting up SSH to GitHub git clone into your Oracle Cloud Linux Ubuntu VM with VNC”

  1. Hi, regarding your tweet on implementing azure login for ords . Can u pls guide . U can send an email to dvvnreddy@gmail.com

    My goal is

    We created api , but we want users to get authenticated . Instead of creating schemas and using basic authentication we want them to use azure credentials. Pls guide me

    Thanks,
    Narayana

    Reply

Leave a Comment