Recently, I could not get ssh working with gitea. I got all sorts of error - Connection timed out, Too many authentication failure, ssh freezing, et al. Stuff I never encountered with github. ssh worked on its own, and so did gitea’s username-password authentication. Assuming yours does too, here is how you can troubleshoot this.

Client

If you haven’t, generate a key ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your key's label", and add it to your gitea instance at the web endpoint /user/settings/keys. This will create an entry in the file /home/<gitea user>/.ssh/authorized_keys.

Server

Run sudo nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config to allow connections from your gitea system user. My gitea user is called “git”. If you don’t know what your gitea user is called, look for RUN_USER inside sudo nano /etc/gitea/app.ini. You can also look at who owns gitea’s data files with ls -la /var/lib/gitea/data. This should match the RUN_USER.

PermitRootLogin no
AllowUsers abc def git
...

Make sure ~/.ssh has the correct permissions set,

sudo chmod -R 700 ~/.ssh
sudo chmod 640 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
sudo sudo chown -R $USER ~/.ssh/

Restart ssh.

Client

Add a config entry to ~/.ssh/ssh_config

Host gitea    # call this whatever you'd like
HostName 192.168.1.77
User git      # matches the ssh AllowUsers directive
Port 7778
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/gitea

Now git commands should work.

# git remote add originssh git@<host name from your ssh_config, mine is gitea>:<gitea web user>/<repo name>.git
git remote add originssh git@gitea:n00b/guides.git
git pull origin master

References,

• [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gitea
• [2] https://superuser.com/a/1519694