# How to specify the SSH key for Pkg to use

**URL:** <https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-specify-the-ssh-key-for-pkg-to-use/14784>\
**Category:** General Usage\
**Tags:** pkg, github, ssh\
**Created:** [September 10, 2018, 9:11pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-specify-the-ssh-key-for-pkg-to-use/14784 "2018-09-10T21:11:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 6

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**Author:** ![GunnarFarneback](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/gunnarfarneback/32/1827_2.png) [@GunnarFarneback](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/GunnarFarneback)\
**Post date:** [March 24, 2020, 9:52am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-specify-the-ssh-key-for-pkg-to-use/14784/6 "2020-03-24T09:52:21Z")

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If you already have the key in the default location, setting `SSH_KEY_PATH` and `SSH_PUB_KEY_PATH` won’t help. It is unfortunate that it keeps asking for `private key location` when what it really means is that something, anything, went wrong during the authentication, and frequently the location of the key is not at all the problem.

Sadly it’s not that easy to debug this. If you have control of the server end you may be able to enable debug output from the ssh server and possibly make sense of it. If you cannot get information from the server and you are sufficiently desperate you can try [https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/issues/1516#issuecomment-560794389](https://github.com/JuliaLang/Pkg.jl/issues/1516#issuecomment-560794389).

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