git-credential(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | TYPICAL USE OF GIT CREDENTIAL | INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT | GIT | COLOPHON

GIT-CREDENTIAL(1)              Git Manual              GIT-CREDENTIAL(1)

NAME         top

       git-credential - Retrieve and store user credentials

SYNOPSIS         top

       'git credential' (fill|approve|reject)

DESCRIPTION         top

       Git has an internal interface for storing and retrieving
       credentials from system-specific helpers, as well as prompting
       the user for usernames and passwords. The git-credential command
       exposes this interface to scripts which may want to retrieve,
       store, or prompt for credentials in the same manner as Git. The
       design of this scriptable interface models the internal C API;
       see credential.h for more background on the concepts.

       git-credential takes an "action" option on the command-line (one
       of fill, approve, or reject) and reads a credential description
       on stdin (see INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT).

       If the action is fill, git-credential will attempt to add
       "username" and "password" attributes to the description by
       reading config files, by contacting any configured credential
       helpers, or by prompting the user. The username and password
       attributes of the credential description are then printed to
       stdout together with the attributes already provided.

       If the action is approve, git-credential will send the
       description to any configured credential helpers, which may store
       the credential for later use.

       If the action is reject, git-credential will send the description
       to any configured credential helpers, which may erase any stored
       credentials matching the description.

       If the action is approve or reject, no output should be emitted.

TYPICAL USE OF GIT CREDENTIAL         top

       An application using git-credential will typically use git
       credential following these steps:

        1. Generate a credential description based on the context.

           For example, if we want a password for
           https://example.com/foo.git , we might generate the following
           credential description (don’t forget the blank line at the
           end; it tells git credential that the application finished
           feeding all the information it has):

               protocol=https
               host=example.com
               path=foo.git

        2. Ask git-credential to give us a username and password for
           this description. This is done by running git credential
           fill, feeding the description from step (1) to its standard
           input. The complete credential description (including the
           credential per se, i.e. the login and password) will be
           produced on standard output, like:

               protocol=https
               host=example.com
               username=bob
               password=secr3t

           In most cases, this means the attributes given in the input
           will be repeated in the output, but Git may also modify the
           credential description, for example by removing the path
           attribute when the protocol is HTTP(s) and
           credential.useHttpPath is false.

           If the git credential knew about the password, this step may
           not have involved the user actually typing this password (the
           user may have typed a password to unlock the keychain
           instead, or no user interaction was done if the keychain was
           already unlocked) before it returned password=secr3t.

        3. Use the credential (e.g., access the URL with the username
           and password from step (2)), and see if it’s accepted.

        4. Report on the success or failure of the password. If the
           credential allowed the operation to complete successfully,
           then it can be marked with an "approve" action to tell git
           credential to reuse it in its next invocation. If the
           credential was rejected during the operation, use the
           "reject" action so that git credential will ask for a new
           password in its next invocation. In either case, git
           credential should be fed with the credential description
           obtained from step (2) (which also contains the fields
           provided in step (1)).

INPUT/OUTPUT FORMAT         top

       git credential reads and/or writes (depending on the action used)
       credential information in its standard input/output. This
       information can correspond either to keys for which git
       credential will obtain the login information (e.g. host,
       protocol, path), or to the actual credential data to be obtained
       (username/password).

       The credential is split into a set of named attributes, with one
       attribute per line. Each attribute is specified by a key-value
       pair, separated by an = (equals) sign, followed by a newline.

       The key may contain any bytes except =, newline, or NUL. The
       value may contain any bytes except newline or NUL.

       Attributes with keys that end with C-style array brackets [] can
       have multiple values. Each instance of a multi-valued attribute
       forms an ordered list of values - the order of the repeated
       attributes defines the order of the values. An empty multi-valued
       attribute (key[]=\n) acts to clear any previous entries and reset
       the list.

       In all cases, all bytes are treated as-is (i.e., there is no
       quoting, and one cannot transmit a value with newline or NUL in
       it). The list of attributes is terminated by a blank line or
       end-of-file.

       Git understands the following attributes:

       protocol
           The protocol over which the credential will be used (e.g.,
           https).

       host
           The remote hostname for a network credential. This includes
           the port number if one was specified (e.g.,
           "example.com:8088").

       path
           The path with which the credential will be used. E.g., for
           accessing a remote https repository, this will be the
           repository’s path on the server.

       username
           The credential’s username, if we already have one (e.g., from
           a URL, the configuration, the user, or from a previously run
           helper).

       password
           The credential’s password, if we are asking it to be stored.

       password_expiry_utc
           Generated passwords such as an OAuth access token may have an
           expiry date. When reading credentials from helpers, git
           credential fill ignores expired passwords. Represented as
           Unix time UTC, seconds since 1970.

       oauth_refresh_token
           An OAuth refresh token may accompany a password that is an
           OAuth access token. Helpers must treat this attribute as
           confidential like the password attribute. Git itself has no
           special behaviour for this attribute.

       url
           When this special attribute is read by git credential, the
           value is parsed as a URL and treated as if its constituent
           parts were read (e.g., url=https://example.com would behave
           as if protocol=https and host=example.com had been provided).
           This can help callers avoid parsing URLs themselves.

           Note that specifying a protocol is mandatory and if the URL
           doesn’t specify a hostname (e.g., "cert:///path/to/file") the
           credential will contain a hostname attribute whose value is
           an empty string.

           Components which are missing from the URL (e.g., there is no
           username in the example above) will be left unset.

       wwwauth[]
           When an HTTP response is received by Git that includes one or
           more WWW-Authenticate authentication headers, these will be
           passed by Git to credential helpers.

           Each WWW-Authenticate header value is passed as a
           multi-valued attribute wwwauth[], where the order of the
           attributes is the same as they appear in the HTTP response.
           This attribute is one-way from Git to pass additional
           information to credential helpers.

       Unrecognised attributes are silently discarded.

GIT         top

       Part of the git(1) suite

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the git (Git distributed version control
       system) project.  Information about the project can be found at
       ⟨http://git-scm.com/⟩.  If you have a bug report for this manual
       page, see ⟨http://git-scm.com/community⟩.  This page was obtained
       from the project's upstream Git repository
       ⟨https://github.com/git/git.git⟩ on 2023-12-22.  (At that time,
       the date of the most recent commit that was found in the
       repository was 2023-12-20.)  If you discover any rendering
       problems in this HTML version of the page, or you believe there
       is a better or more up-to-date source for the page, or you have
       corrections or improvements to the information in this COLOPHON
       (which is not part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

Git 2.43.0.174.g055bb6         2023-12-20              GIT-CREDENTIAL(1)

Pages that refer to this page: git(1)git-config(1)git-send-email(1)gitcredentials(7)