Permission Denied (publickey)

Had the same issue.

I had multiple public keys in my ~/.ssh/ directory: ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.gitlab.pub, ~/.ssh/id_rsa.planio.pub

I checked my public key in my SSH Keys settings section und gitlab.com and it matches my id_rsa.gitlab.pub key. So I thought everything should be fine. But still got the Permission denied error when try to push initial project.

Finally the problem was in my ~/.ssh/config file, where I wrongly put these lines:

    #
    # gitlab
    #

    Host gitlab.com
            Preferredauthentications publickey
            IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Changed the IdentityFile to ~/.ssh/id_rsa.gitlab and sure it worked!

If you’re running gitlab locally under the docker and run the container with port forwarding (e.g 2224:22) and tried every thing from internet, just try this:

Host gitlab.local
    Preferredauthentications publickey
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_gitlab_local
    Port 2224

With Port option your git commands will be addressed right to the gitlab container
Instead of gitlab.local you can use any domain or IP address

this already solve my problem for case like this, but can i expect the default gitlab creation is pointing to https by default?

This is not the first time i face push failure