From: Adam Szkoda <adaszko@xxxxxxxxx> When signing a commit with a SSH key, with the private key missing from ssh-agent, a confusing error message is produced: error: Load key "/var/folders/t5/cscwwl_n3n1_8_5j_00x_3t40000gn/T//.git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7": invalid format? fatal: failed to write commit object The temporary file .git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7 created by git contains a valid *public* key. The error message comes from `ssh-keygen -Y sign' and is caused by a fallback mechanism in ssh-keygen whereby it tries to interpret .git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7 as a *private* key if it can't find in the agent [1]. A fix is scheduled to be released in OpenSSH 9.1. All that needs to be done is to pass an additional backward-compatible option -U to 'ssh-keygen -Y sign' call. With '-U', ssh-keygen always interprets the file as public key and expects to find the private key in the agent. As a result, when the private key is missing from the agent, a more accurate error message gets produced: error: Couldn't find key in agent [1] https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3429 Signed-off-by: Adam Szkoda <adaszko@xxxxxxxxx> --- ssh signing: better error message when key not in agent When signing a commit with a SSH key, with the private key missing from ssh-agent, a confusing error message is produced: error: Load key "/var/folders/t5/cscwwl_n3n1_8_5j_00x_3t40000gn/T//.git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7": invalid format? fatal: failed to write commit object The temporary file .git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7 created by git contains a valid public key. The error message comes from `ssh-keygen -Y sign' and is caused by a fallback mechanism in ssh-keygen whereby it tries to interpret .git_signing_key_tmpkArSj7 as a private key if it can't find in the agent [1]. A fix is scheduled to be released in OpenSSH 9.1. All that needs to be done is to pass an additional backward-compatible option -U to 'ssh-keygen -Y sign' call. With '-U', ssh-keygen always interprets the file as public key and expects to find the private key in the agent. As a result, when the private key is missing from the agent, a more accurate error message gets produced: error: Couldn't find key in agent [1] https://bugzilla.mindrot.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3429 Published-As: https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git/releases/tag/pr-git-1270%2Fradicle-dev%2Fmaint-v1 Fetch-It-Via: git fetch https://github.com/gitgitgadget/git pr-git-1270/radicle-dev/maint-v1 Pull-Request: https://github.com/git/git/pull/1270 gpg-interface.c | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) diff --git a/gpg-interface.c b/gpg-interface.c index 280f1fa1a58..4a5913ae942 100644 --- a/gpg-interface.c +++ b/gpg-interface.c @@ -1022,6 +1022,7 @@ static int sign_buffer_ssh(struct strbuf *buffer, struct strbuf *signature, strvec_pushl(&signer.args, use_format->program, "-Y", "sign", "-n", "git", + "-U", "-f", ssh_signing_key_file, buffer_file->filename.buf, NULL); base-commit: e54793a95afeea1e10de1e5ad7eab914e7416250 -- gitgitgadget