"git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey)"

Build Environment
1

We at Tahoe-LAFS project has been using CircleCI for some years now. CircleCI has stopped working for us a few weeks back. Our CircleCI project is https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs, and our GitHub project is https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/.

I see two kinds of error messages. On https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/4958/workflows/d16324ae-293d-45c8-ba97-6ac39ef4cfc4/jobs/86359, for instance, is this one:

Warning: checkout key has zero length
Writing SSH key for checkout to "/tmp/nobody/.ssh/id_rsa"
Fetching into existing repository
Fetching from remote repository
Warning: Permanently added the ECDSA host key for IP address '140.82.112.3' to the list of known hosts.
Load key "/tmp/nobody/.ssh/id_rsa": invalid format
git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

And https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs/4957/workflows/1b68aca6-6a7f-4cee-9df5-fa73eded9cd7/jobs/86336 has a slightly different message:

Writing SSH key for checkout to "/tmp/nobody/.ssh/id_rsa"
Writing SSH public key for checkout to "/tmp/nobody/.ssh/id_rsa.pub"
Fetching into existing repository
Fetching from remote repository
git@github.com: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Any idea what might be going on?

I see several topics matching the error message that I’m searching for, band it seems that I will need admin access to the GitHub project to reset deploy keys. I do not have admin access to the GitHub project.

Why did CircleCI stop being able to check out all of a sudden, without any action from our part?

Tahoe-LAFS is a public project, and we do not really need CircleCI to check out using SSH. Can we get CircleCI to check out sources using HTTPS?

2

First thing I’d try would be to have someone who’s an org owner remove and re-add the CircleCI integration. Possibly something interfered with or removed the deploy key that the integration uses.

You can also try opening a support case in cases like this (I think even with open source projects).

3

Can also try the variant mentioned here.

4

Can we not make it checkout via HTTPS? Why do we need any ssh keys at all?

(Somewhere else it was suggested to remove any that exist – for tahoe-lafs/zfec project, there are none but it’s still trying to check out via SSH instead of HTTPS)