If you already own a GitHub account and try to clone from or push to a repository on GitHub you may receive a

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Permission denied (publickey)

error.

This may be the case if you have set up a new machine without having installed your existing ssh key properly.

To do so, just copy your private key to your ~/.ssh directory and call:

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$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

whereas id_rsa is the name of your ssh key.

Another reason why you fail, may be a missing .config file in your ~/.ssh folder.

If this is the case, just create it and paste the following into it:

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Host github.com
  User git
  Port 22
  Hostname github.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
  TCPKeepAlive yes
  IdentitiesOnly yes