SCP not working in EC2 (AWS) - linux

Question

I can SSH into the EC2 instance:
ssh -i "my_key.pem" ec2-user#my-public-ip
However, scp doesn't work:
scp -r –i "my_key.pem" ./my_file ec2-user#my-public-ip:/home/ec2-user/my_file
Permission denied (publickey).
lost connection
I've also tried using public instance DNS, but nothing changes.
Any idea why is this happening and how to solve it?

Answer 1

The only way for this to happen is the private key mykey.pem is not found in the current directory. It is possible you tried ssh from a directory different than scp.
Try the following with full path to your key:
scp -r –i /path/to/my_key.pem ./my_file ec2-user#my-public-ip:/home/ec2-user/my_file
If it fails, post the output with -v option. It will tell you exactly where the problem is
scp -v -r –i /path/to/my_key.pem ./my_file ec2-user#my-public-ip:/home/ec2-user/my_file

Answer 2

I am bit late but this might be help full to someone.
Do not use the /home/ec2-user. Rather directly use the file name or folder name
E.g. the following command will put your my_file at the home folder (i.e. /home/ec2-user)
scp -r –i "my_key.pem" ./my_file ec2-user#my-public-ip:my_file
Or Say if you have a folder at /home/ect-user/my_data
Then use the following command to copy your file to the folder
scp -r –i "my_key.pem" ./my_file ec2-user#my-public-ip:my_data

Answer 3

Stupidly late addendum:
To avoid specifying the private key every time, just add to the .ssh/config file (create it if not already there) the following (without comments):
Host testserver // a memorable alias
Hostname 12.34.56.67 // your server ip
User ec2-user // user to connect
IdentityFile /path/to/key.pem // path to the private key
PasswordAuthentication no
Then a simple ssh testserver should work from anywhere (and consequently your scp too).
I use it to connect with Vim via scp using:
vim scp://testserver/relative/file/path
or
vim scp://testserver//absolute/file/path
and
vim scp://testserver/relative/dir/path/ (note the trailing slash)
to respectively edit files and browse folders directly from local (thus using my precious .vimrc <3 configuration).
Solution found here
Hope this helps! :)

Answer 4

I was facing this issue today and found solution for me (not elegant but one which worked). - this solution is good if you want to download something once and rollback all settings afterwards.
Solution:
When I specified -v option while using scp I noticed the certificate is being denied for some reason so I went to /etc/ssh/sshd_config and set PasswordAuthentication yes. Then I used systemctl restart sshd.
After this procedure I went to my local machine and used:
scp -v -r myname#VPC:/home/{user}/filename.txt path/on/local/machine
provided PWD and file transmission has been successful.
Hope this helps to someone :)