How to fix "Permission denied (publickey)." error when pushing to Github (mac)

I was trying to push to Github from VSCode when I got the following error:

[email protected]: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

I am not really sure what happened since I hadn't changed anything. The only thing I can think of is I installed SourceTree, but I don't remember messing with any of my settings. Anyways this is how I fixed this "Permission denied (publickey)" error.

1. Open your terminal and do cd ~/.ssh.

2. Type ls. You should see id_rsa and id_rsa.pub. My issue was that those files were not there anymore. To create those files, do step 3:

3. Run: ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "[email protected]", replacing "[email protected]" with your actual email.

4. Open the file id_rsa.pub. If you have VSCode, you can just do code id_rsa.pub (explained here), and it opens the file in VS Code. Otherwise, you can do vim id_rsa.pub. (you can exit out of vim by typing :q!).

5. Copy everything you see (make sure you don't copy any extra spaces).

6. Go to github.com -> Settings -> SSH and GPG Keys https://github.com/settings/keys. Click "New SSH Key". Give it a title and paste in the key. Finally, click "Add SSH Key".

7. That's it. Try git push again, and it should work.