Permission is denied while connecting to server with ansible via ssh

Posted on November 3, 2017

I’m getting the error below when I’m writing this

ansible -m ping all

host1 | UNREACHABLE! => {
    "changed": false,
    "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Permission denied (publickey,password).\r\n",
    "unreachable": true
}

I have gone through all the steps in this tutorial and now I’m stuck at step 3. https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-configure-ansible-on-ubuntu-16-04

Any help is appreciated.

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yachtman

November 16, 2017

Since you can connect directly, your ansible is defaulting to a different key. Create/edit your ansible.cfg file in your playbook directory and add a line for the location of your key:

[defaults] private_key_file = /Users/username/.ssh/private_key

Nazneen Shaikh

September 8, 2018

This error usually occurs when their is no valid public key set for the target server.

First check whether you have valid public and private key generated for the user which you are using. Keep public key in target server and private key in control server Get the path for private key and configure it in ansible.cfg file(check ansible docs for this)