JIYIK CN >

This article will teach you how to set up and save user credentials in Git.

Git is a version control system that uses Git repositories to track changes in project directories. In Git, Git remote repositories are secured by using protocols such as HTTPS for authentication.

Proper credentials must be provided to access and modify a secure remote Git repository. Instead of providing them when we need to access or modify a secure remote Git repository, we can save the user credentials in Git.

We will now illustrate this with an example.

Setting and saving user credentials in Git

Git prompts the user for username and password whenever the user tries to access or modify the remote Git repository using commands such as git pulland respectively.git push

We can choose to save user credentials ie. username and password, in Git instead of entering them every time Git prompts.

We can use Git command git config to save user credentials. We need to execute git config command as follows.

$ git config --global credential.helper store

The above git configcommand can store the user credentials on disk in Git. The credentials are stored in the file .git-credentials in the home folder ~/.git-credentials.

Please note that user credentials, ie. username and password, are stored in clear text on disk.

The credentials file .git-credentials is not encrypted and anyone with access to the file can view the credentials.

After entering the command to enable credential storage as mentioned above git config, every time we try to access or modify the Git remote repository, Git will prompt once for the credentials, ie. username and password.

After entering the correct credentials, Git will save these credentials on disk. In this way, we can execute the command git pull, and Git will prompt us for the username and password, which will then be saved on disk.

In subsequent calls to access or modify the remote Git repository, the credentials saved in the disk storage are used for authentication. Therefore, the user is no longer prompted to enter a username and password.

We can also choose to use a different credential helper, such as a memcache. We can use a memcache to temporarily save the user credentials in memory.

We need to execute git configthe command to use memory cache as shown below.

$ git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=<timeout>'

The command above temporarily saves the credentials in memory. The timeout parameter is optional and is the number of seconds to cache the credentials.

The above command sets the timeout to 900 seconds by default, ie. 15 minutes, and if the timeout parameter is not specified, the credentials are temporarily saved in memory.

So, we learned how to set up and save user credentials in Git.