We are using a locally hosted instance of gitlab. It's a nice program and are enjoying many things about it.
Most of the people working on it live a fairly simple life. I am not one of them. I work a zillion servers and SSH all over the place. I have many RSA keys for various purposes. To keep track of them, I used the comment section of the public key to let me know which one is which.
EG, a public key might end
...SSCtQUvSJ5jdfW9YB3w== mySpecialKeyName
Time came to move a repo from github to gitlab. I grabbed the public key I was using for github and pasted it into the settings of gitlab. It accepted it happily.
Also, it did not work. When I tried to push my newly re-origined ("git remote add origin git@...") repo to git lab, it asked me for a password. There is, of course, no password nor should it ever ask for one.
After trying EVERYTHING, I noticed instructions in the gitlab page that reminded me to copy my public key completely. It said from ssh-rsa to the "email address".
I changed it to
...SCtQUvSJ5jdfW9YB3w== tq@myGitlabEmailAddress.com
And it worked.
You're welcome.
PS, Gitlab, if you ever hear about this: This is bullshit. There is not a single annotation anywhere. Even if I was in the habit of using the RSA key comment section for an email address, there's no reason to imagine it would be the right email address. If you're not going to make *me* responsible for establishing the connection between the key and my account, at least do me the solid of giving me an error message when it doesn't have the right info.