Converting PuTTY private keys to OpenSSH format

Overview:

This article will describe why Upsource doens't accept private keys generated in PuTTY and what to do in such cases.

 

Symptoms: 

When creating a new project in Upsource, you get to choose one of the following authentication methods to access your VCS: Anonymous, Password or SSH key. In case of SSH key, private key and passphrase(if any) should be provided. After that, while testing connection you might get the following error:

Test VCS connection failed.

List remote refs failed: com.jcraft.jsch.JSchException: Error while loading an uploaded key 'the-key': invalid privatekey

 

Solution:

Most likely your public/private key pair was generated via PuTTYgen. Upsource doesn't work with PuTTY-format private keys, so you would need to convert it to OpenSSH format. To do that, please perform the following steps:

  1. Open PuttyGen
  2. Click File -> Load private key
  3. Go to Conversions -> Export OpenSSH and export your private key
  4. Try to paste converted private key to Upsource

 

 

 

10 out of 21 found this helpful
2 comments

This is no help at all, it makes the assumption you are on Windows and not using the standard ssh lib on *unix based systems.

1

Invalid

```
-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----
```


Correct

```
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
```

 

Step to fix

Remove old files

```
rm -rf ~/.ssh/*
```

Create new File (-m pem)

```
ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 -m pem -f ~/.ssh/google_compute_engine -C username
```

0

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