Storing Github credentials on disk (for https protocol)

The way to avoid passwords on pull/push commands will dependent on which git protocol is used to track the remote repo. For gitub I use https because it can work with the firewall used at my work place.

The way to avoid having to type the username and password all the time is using one of the git credential helpers. The simplest one is probably using a cache. If you want to cache the credentials for, 1 hour you could use

git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'

Git does not seem to come with a native way to store the credentials on disk, but it can be configured to use a script to provide the credentials. The script will be in charge of reading the credentials from a file (encrypted) and pass them to git. The accepted answer for this stackoverflow question illustrates how to do this.

First, download the script with

wget git-credential-netrc https://raw.github.com/git/git/master/contrib/credential/netrc/git-credential-netrc

Copy this script to some folder in your path (such as /usr/local/bin/) and set its execute permission.

Now set the credential helper in git with

git config --global credential.helper "netrc -f ~/.authinfo.gpg -v"

The name netrc comes from the script name. You could change this to somethingelse if you renamed the script to git-credential-somethingelse.

Since I already had an .authinfo.gpg file I'm using that one. What we need to add to .authinfo.gpg is a line such as

machine github.com login myemail@gmail.com password MyPassWord protocol https

Note that the protocol part is important. I initially tried without it but using https://github.com as the machine name, but it didn't work. Furthermore, we are using the gpg extension here, which means the file will be encrypted with gpg. You need to have a configured gpg key for this to work.