Git clone, push and pull from multiple users on Ubuntu server

Question

Background

I have a Linode server with Ubuntu 16.04 as on OS on it. The server is for my internal team. We have repos hosted on github, bitbucket and gitlab. Only server admin has the access to the server.

We have generated ssh keys for all the users, added them to git providers and cloned the repos

Problem Statement

Whenever I do git pull on server, it always asks for the main passphrase of main key file

Enter passphrase for key '/root/.ssh/id_rsa': 

When I enter the passphrase, it shows me Permission denied error

Answer 1

You should generate a password-less key pair (just hit [enter] when ssh-keygen asks for a password). And if the server only does pulls, you man want to restrict it its rights to "read-only" on the repository side, so that if the key gets compromised it won't allow someone to damage your repository or worse add backdoors in your code.

If the problem is that you have several keys (one for each of github, bitbucket and gitlab), and git only uses one, then what you need to do is set up ~/.ssh/config to specify a different key for each server:

Host github.com
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa_github
User someuser

but even in that case you need passwordless keys.