Tips for debugging forge issues

[muihlinn]

Background

At some point I had forge working well with github and all kind of repos.
After several months hiatus , with the corresponding emacs and magit-related updates, the tokens I had were erased, made a new one, changed it in .authinfo.gpg, and I haven't been able to make it work anymore.

What I've done

• I've Read all the manuals and rechecked all configs
• Confirmed that the token has the right permissions as manual states
• Confirmed that I can use the personal token from the command line
• Confirmed that I can use my ssh key with github from magit
• tried several searchs for similar issues

What I keep getting

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

---

I'm running out of ideas on what is going on , what to try or how to debug this issue to make it work again.

[tarsius]

fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

This error isn't coming from Forge but Git. That makes this more of a Magit issue than a Forge issue, but really it is either a Emacs configuration issue or even a Git configuration issue.

Where are you getting that and is it prefixed with the git command that produced that error?

Confirmed that I can use my ssh key with github from magit

So you can git fetch on the command line, but the equivalent magit-fetch also works? The above error indicates that magit-fetch does not work. (That's why I asked above about how you got that error.)

It has been a long time since someone last asked me for help with this, so I don't exactly remember where all the footguns are. Generally speaking if it works in a shell but not Emacs, the issue is that the user configured the shell but did not configure Emacs accordingly.

A first thing you can try is to type emacs & in a shell, instead of starting it by clicking on an icon or something like that. This may work because it causes Emacs to inherit the environment of the shell.

A common solution to the problem of Emacs not just magically picking up the configuration of the shell, seem to be the exec-path-from-shell package. But that too needs a bit of additional setup, the settings mentioned at the end of https://github.com/purcell/exec-path-from-shell?tab=readme-ov-file#usage.

[muihlinn]

Thre is something weird here about it, but everything seems correct.

I noticed that during the hiatus I changed the default ubuntu for i3, so it makes sense that something in the env may have changed, but I haven't changed either shell or emacs config about magit or env in a very long while. Anyway I tried, and fails equally.

I get the same error either fetching f e remote or trying to do it with N commands and trying to fetch it from gh. Other LAN remotes work just fine.

Ironically if I clone the repo from the command line and then manage it from magit I can use magit to fetch origin but N commands fails equally. What remote to use, when it's needed, is specified locally in git config. Not sure what's going on there or how to set a trap to find out what causes it, but doesn't smell like a bug to me, more like an obscure issue with things I cannot figure.

[muihlinn]

main culprit wasn't shell, was something involving ssh identities and the upstream url which - yet - I cannot explain why didn't happened before. It's working now but I'm not sure if I found the underlying issue or just a way to circumvent it. Thanks much!

[tarsius]

I feel for you. I too have to soon investigate an hairy ssh issue I've been suffering from for a while now. ☹️