My colleague Dave Cameron has been telling me about his adventures playing around with Git Sharp (a C# port of the Java Git implementation jGit) so I thought I’d get a copy of the code and have a look as well.

I tend to check out all code bases from my host machine instead of virtual machine so I got the code all checked out on the Mac and accessed it via a shared folder on my VM.

The problem with doing this is I was unable to run the tests due to the following error which I received repeatedly:

I’m not sure exactly why I got this error but it’s probably due to the fact that I didn’t open the project in normal mode since I am accessing it on a shared drive.

I decided it would probably just be quicker to checkout the code directly from the VM instead.

I installed msysgit which all worked fine and then I went to clone my repository:

Which resulted in the following error:

I had the public key setup on my github account from when I was using Git from my Mac but I hadn’t setup the private key that it requires inside my VM!

Browsing through the instructions on the github website I realised that I needed to copy my private key into the '.ssh' folder (which as I understand is the default folder for ssh settings to be stored).

This folder needs to be at the root of your user folder rather than at the root of the drive as I originally thought.

Therefore it should be at 'C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/.ssh' for example rather than 'C:/.ssh' as I mistakenly had it.

I couldn’t find a way to create a folder which started with a '.' from Windows explorer so I just created a folder called 'ssh' and then renamed it using 'mv ssh .ssh' from the command line.

I then copied my private key (which I got from the Mac by running 'less ~/.ssh/id_rsa') into a file called 'id_rsa' inside the '.ssh' folder and all was good:

In the process of working out what I’d done wrong I came across a nice post by Sergio Pereira which describes the whole process of getting up and running with Git in more detail.