After migrating to SSH authentication for my Bitbucket repo ( one of the reasons for doing that was to be able to mirror my repo on my home server, article on that topic coming soon ), the TortoiseGIT windows client stopped working. It was unable to do pulls and pushes and all other functionallity related to connecting to the remote GIT. Android Studio and other IDE’s and tools I use on a daily basis, including git command line client were working properly.

TortoiseGIT uses Pageant (part of the PuTTY toolset) to manage it’s authentication keys. Because I have already generated the public / private key pair using ssh-keygen all I needed to do was make Pageant aware of them.

For this Puttygen (part of the PuTTY toolset) should be used.

Load the key in Puttygen (you will be prompted for password during the loading process), leave the default settings. If the import was successful you will get a message telling you so.

Then click ‘Save private key’ button and save your private key in putty default ppk format. Fire up Pageant and load your newly created key.

Now pulls, pushes and all other functionallity related to connecting to the remote GIT should work as expected.

NOTE: Pageant should be started prior to using TortoiseGIT, else you will get the same error message again.