git clone with SSH only working in Git Bash not on Windows CMD

Question

So, I've followed this tutorial on how to Setup SSH for github with Windows CMD and all was working fine until I went to clone a repo with

git clone [email protected]:{myusername}/{myrepo}.git

Where I get

[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

Even when I run ssh -T [email protected] I get the expected message telling me I'm authenticated.

After scratching my brain for a while, I decided to try it on git bash.

First thing I noticed was that running

 ssh-add -l

in git bash, I was getting The agent has no identities. but when I run the same command on Windows CMD I get all my SSH keys?

So, after adding my ssh key in git bash I was able to clone my repository.

So, why is it only on git bash I can do this and not on the cmd or powershell? Is it something to do with what seems like they are using different ssh agents? How can I sync them together if that is the case?

Furthermore, when I run the following command

ssh -Tv [email protected]

with the cmd I get

debug1: identity file C:\\Users\\{myuserdirectory}/.ssh/id_rsa type 0
debug1: key_load_public: No such file or directory

but with git bash I get

debug1: identity file /c/Users/{myuserdirectory}/.ssh/id_rsa type 0

Another difference is that in windows cmd I don't get any instances of debug1: Will attempt key: ....

When I exit git bash and open up another git bash terminal, running ssh-add -l again, it returns The agent has no identities. even after I added it before, it's like it only persists for each session, which also isn't desirable.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Probably you were right and they were using different ssh-agents. I had exactly the same problem and this answer helped me a lot: https://stackoverflow.com/a/40720527/6486458

By default git refers to its own ssh in C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin. I added GIT_SSH environment variable and set it to C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe. This prevents inconsistency between the versions of ssh. After that git started to work as expected from both Git Bash and Windows cmd.

From git documentation:

GIT_SSH, if specified, is a program that is invoked instead of ssh when Git tries to connect to an SSH host. It is invoked like $GIT_SSH [username@]host [-p <port>] <command>.

See also this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/8713121/6486458