SCP Permission denied (publickey). on EC2 only when using -r flag on directories

amazon-ec2, file-permissions, scp, unix

Solution

The `-i` flag specifies the private key (.pem file) to use. If you don't specify that flag (as in your first command) it will use your default ssh key (usually under `~/.ssh/`).

So in your first command, you are actually asking `scp` to upload the .pem file itself using your default ssh key. I don't think that is what you want.

Try instead with:

scp -r -i /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/keypairfile.pem uploads/* ec2-user@publicdns:/var/www/html/uploads

Problem

`scp -r /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/keypairfile.pem uploads ec2-user@publicdns:/var/www/html` where uploads is a directory returns Permission denied (publickey). However `scp -i /Applications/XAMPP/htdocs/keypairfile.pem footer.php ec2-user@publicdns:/var/www/html` works (notice the flag change). uploads is an empty folder These are the file permissions for the uploads directory `drwxrwxrwx 3 geoffreysangston admin 102 Nov 15 01:40 uploads` These are the file permissions for /var/www/html `drwxr-x--- 2 ec2-user ec2-user 4096 Jan 5 20:45 html` I've tried changing html to 777 and that doesn't work either.

Original source