GitLab: SSH key does not work — Miscellaneous Tech Bits

After setting up GitLab server I found git operations via SSH did not work. I tried the following:

rake gitlab:check to check for any obvious errors
rake gitlab:shell:setup as suggested in this ticket, there is another more recently opened ticket
regenerate SSH client keys
checking the permissions of /usr/local/git/.ssh and /home/git/.ssh for git user

Everything from the above seemed to check out.

However the root cause in my case turned out to be that the location of the authorized_keys file for git user needed to be updated in the GitLab YAML configuration file gitlab.yml from:

  ## GitLab Shell settings
  gitlab_shell:
    path: /usr/local/share/gitlab-shell/
    authorized_keys_file: /usr/local/git/.ssh/authorized_keys

to:

  ## GitLab Shell settings
  gitlab_shell:
    path: /usr/local/share/gitlab-shell/
    authorized_keys_file: /home/git/.ssh/authorized_keys

Then after re-running rake gitlab:shell:setup a git user’s SSH started working.

This appeared to be the FreeBSD port specific issue where gitlab.yml.example was patched replacing /home with /usr/local prefix for paths in the YAML configuration file.