`abra` tries its best to learn from your system configuration or command-line input what the correct SSH connection details are for a given server. This doesn't always work out. Here are some things to try to fix it.
First, ensure that you can `ssh <my-server>` and things work. If you can't SSH to your server then neither can `abra`. If you have a password protected SSH key, then you'll need to make sure your `ssh-agent` is running and you've added your SSH key part:
The first thing `abra` will check for is the connection details listed in `abra server ls`. Check those details are correct. If you haven't managed to `abra server add` your server yet, then no details will appear in that list. You may need to take a look at [this entry](/abra/trouble/#abra-server-ls-shows-the-wrong-details) to clean up old values depending on your situation.
`abra` will then try to read your `~/.ssh/config` entries and match the server domain against a `Host` entry. So, if you do `ssh myserver.com` and you have:
```
Host myserver.com
Hostname myserver.com
User myuser
Port 222
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/my@myserver.com
```
Then `abra` should have all it needs to build a working SSH connection. You can validate this by passing `-d/--debug` to your commands.
However, sometimes, you use an alias in your SSH configuration, say:
```
Host mys
...
```
So that you can simply type `ssh mys`. `abra` won't be able to match against those entries to discover connection details. You can use aliases to remedy this:
```
Host mys, myserver.com
...
```
`abra` will try to read the relevant `IdentityFile` entry from your `~/.ssh/config` but if it can't make a match, it will rely on your key being added to the `ssh-agent`.
Due to a limitation in our implementation, `abra` uses 2 methods of making SSH connections, the main `abra` -> `remote docker` connection using `/usr/bin/ssh` which can seamlessly pick up loaded SSH keys. However, for SSH host key checking, `abra` uses an SSH library & Golang SSH internals. We're working on resolving this to a single implementation but it is tricky work.
You can use `abra server rm` to remove the incorrect details. Make sure to take a backup of your `~/.abra/servers/<domain>` first. You can then try to re-create by using `abra server add ...` again, making sure to take care if you need to use `<user> <port>`, see `abra server add -h` for more help on this.
However, if you have Docker installed on the same machine you have `abra`, then there might be some confusion. If you run `docker context ls` you'll see that Docker uses context connection strings also. `abra` simply uses this approach. Sometimes, your Docker defined context details & your `abra` context details can get out of sync. You can use `docker context rm` to resolve this.
If you need to create a new context from Docker, you can do:
Unfortunately, there is a limitation in our underlying command-line library implementation for `abra` ([ref](https://github.com/urfave/cli/issues/1113)) (and more fundamentally in the design of flags in the Go programming language itself ([ref](https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/GoFlagUIImportance))). We're aiming to work with upstream to resolve the flag handling but this it is not yet clear when this will be resolved.
