I can't deploy to a SSH or SFTP server

There are several things you can check when you are having problems deploying to your SSH or SFTP server. Here are some of them:

If you are using public key authentication, try with login based authentication instead.

This will allow you to see if the problem is related to the public key you've added.

Check permissions on your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file.

Make sure that the authorized_keys file is located in home directory of a user you're using to setup deployments, and that the permissions on it are set to 0600. You can set the correct permissions for the file with this command:

chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Check that the key you downloaded from DeployBot is properly inserted in the authorized_keys file.

Each key in the authorized_keys file should be on a separate line, in this format:

ssh-rsa AAAAB3...long-key-here...hUIo6uTLn staging-deployments@deploybot.com
ssh-rsa AAAAB3...long-key-here...7bSkeiFdQ production-deployments@deploybot.com

Check your SSH log files.

You should be able to find error messages related to the deployment attempt in one of these files: /var/log/messages, /var/log/secure, /var/log/auth.log or similar, depending on your OS version.

Check MaxAuthTries option in your sshd_config file.

You can find your sshd_config file in /etc/sshd_config, /etc/ssh/sshd_config or a similar location. MaxAuthTries should be set to a value no less than 5. This is required since we have different levels of keys on our side, and we may provide more than one key for the authorization.