Pijul on macOS Fails with ssh/Nest – Seeking Nest Source Access and Contribution Opportunities

I’m unable to get Pijul on Mac working with Nest, and it seems to be a recurring issue based on discussions I’ve seen on Discourse boards. I’m keen to contribute to resolving this, as I believe Pijul could serve as a decentralized information management layer for a DePIN infrastructure I’m exploring with Mysterium. However, this problem is blocking my investigation.

I’ve included troubleshooting logs below for reference. To dive deeper, I’d like to access Nest’s source code and set up a test environment. Could someone guide me on how to get involved in this way? Alternatively, if there’s a known technical issue with Pijul, resulting in reduced engineering activity on the platform, I’d appreciate an update. I haven’t noticed much recent development, so any insight would help.

Thanks for any assistance or pointers on contributing!

Trouble Shooting Logs / ssh connectivity to nest:

  • MacOS Version: 11.7.10
  • Pijul: Installed via cargo install pijul --version “~1.0.0-beta”, version 1.0.0-beta.9

SSH Key Setup

  • Generated: ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C “EMAIL”

  • ~/.ssh/config:

Host nest.pijul.com
    HostName nest.pijul.com
    User highvibe
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519
  • Public key uploaded to Nest: ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAILcrtP23IcXI5dAgI8l6i9LXx+L0G8EKb0kBvxxEJRGQ EMAIL

pijul identity

  • pijul identity new (selected “no” to SSH key prompt to avoid hang):
~/Library/Application Support/pijul/identities/highvibe/identity.toml:
username = "highvibe"
email = "EMAIL"
origin = "nest.pijul.com"
[public_key]
key = "EJbs1yQA8Tdh9WnbD8TjtHyHn6KbtgYk4UXXTxCKVsUF"

[public_key]
version = 0
algorithm = "Ed25519"
signature = "2hgzvQijSacV3QJ6Z4iCUuv6LZQjDSCPDKd81yphyPTy7PpqidQ9gapq4oJnSVtLCED2CkEZFiEiHJa6JbwpMb7R"
key = "EJbs1yQA8Tdh9WnbD8TjtHyHn6KbtgYk4UXXTxCKVsUF"

identity prove Fails

  • RUST_LOG=“pijul=debug” pijul identity prove highvibeAT[nestHOST]
  [2025-04-03T20:14:01Z DEBUG pijul_remote::ssh] Trying key Ed25519(...)
[2025-04-03T20:14:01Z DEBUG pijul_remote::ssh] fingerprint = "eulf5RwDiNbwc+gf1brMtxhdaJw0g8wL1Y5VlrR3llk"
[2025-04-03T20:14:01Z DEBUG pijul_remote::ssh] authenticate future
Error: "Not authenticated. Please check your credentials and try again."

SSH Succeeds, Hangs

  • ssh -v highvibeAT[NEST HOST] echo TEST
debug1: Offering public key: /Users/don/.ssh/id_ed25519 ED25519 SHA256:eulf5RwDiNbwc+gf1brMtxhdaJw0g8wL1Y5VlrR3llk
debug1: Authentication succeeded (publickey).
debug1: Sending command: echo TEST
[Hangs]

Clone Fails

  • RUST_LOG=“pijul=debug” pijul clone highvibeAT[NEST HOST]/pijul/pijul
[2025-04-03T20:15:55Z DEBUG pijul_remote::ssh] Trying key Ed25519(...)
[2025-04-03T20:15:55Z DEBUG pijul_remote::ssh] authenticate future
[Hangs]

Have you tried the fix mentioned here?

If that fixed it, the issue would likely be a version mismatch between nest and the versioned release of pijul, in my admittedly limited understanding of the problem; nest’s source code is not public (see pijul/pijul - Discussion #963 - Thrussh should be updated to fix push command for nest)

As for contributing, being new (this is my first interaction with people using pijul in fact, hi!), I can’t comment on how to contribute, I feel like the manual book wants to make me believe that the repo’s discussion section is the place for this to happen, but far as I can tell while it does get some talks going, it seems incredibly stale in the case of pijul/pijul itself, the above issue is merely a version bump, has been known since February, and still hasn’t been merged

Hi, also hew here :3

Nest is open source now, but if I recall correctly there is a new version of Nest in development. The repo of the current open source Nest says contributions are accepted, though

Oh I didn’t know, thanks

Hi Rasmus and acvio,
Thank you for your replies. I’ll try the workaround for the nest integration issue you mentioned when I resume investigating Pijul, and I hope this gets fixed in the meantime. Please let me know if there’s progress on a fix.
Thanks,
Don