submodule update fails with ssh, but clone works

[jessegavin]

I am able to clone a repository with ssh just fine.

git clone git@bitbucket.org:team-name/utils.git

However, when this same repo is included as a submodule in another project, I get a Permission Denied (public key) error.

Here is the exact output I get 

$ git submodule update
Cloning into '/Users/me/code/my-project/utils'...
me@bitbucket.org: Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.
Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.
fatal: clone of 'ssh://bitbucket.org/team-name/utils.git' into submodule path '/Users/me/code/my-project/utils' failed
Failed to clone 'utils'.

I want to re-iterate that I definitely have access to the repository and am able to clone the repository via ssh without any problems. This ONLY happens when the repository is included as a submodule in another project.

This is the content of my .gitmodules file

[submodule "utils"]
  path = utils
  url = ssh://bitbucket.org/team-name/utils.git

I've tried everything I can think of.

• Deleted all ssh keys
• Regenerated keys (and added to Bitbucket account)
• I've run ssh -T git@bitbucket.org (it works)
  
  

I am on macOS Monterey (12.1).
git version 2.32.0 (Apple Git-132)

I followed the ssh setup instructions multiple times.

[jessegavin · Accepted solution]

I found out that I needed to specify the user for the submodule command.

There are two ways to do this (maybe more?)

The First way: specify the user in the url 

Change the value of the url field in the .gitmodules so it includes the username

url = ssh://git@bitbucket.org/team-name/utils.git

The Second Way: specify the user in ~/.ssh/config

Host bitbucket.org
    User git