1.3. Configuring your git

Important

Note this could be your GitHub username or other services like GitLab, Bitbucket etc. Check out the 10 alternatives to GitHub here. We will look closely into GitHub for this tutorial.

We shall try to configure your credentials to git. Note that we are using GitHub for hosting for remote repository. Make sure to have your an account created and signed up at GitHub.

1. Open your terminal.

2. Set your username💻:

git config --global user.name "Your username"

3. Set your email📧:

git config --global user.email "your.email@example.com"

3. Check your configuration using

git config --global --list

4. Personal Access Tokens (PAT): In order to use password in GitHub Command Line Interface (CLI), one have to use tokens.

   • Go to settings/tokens, Login is required for this step.

   • Click on “Generate new token” -> “Generate new token (classic)”.

   • Give your token a descriptive name. For eg. one could use a token for performing pushes to certain respository.

   • Select the scopes or permissions you’d like to grant this token. For typical Git operations, the following scopes are recommended: repo, write:packages, workflow, read:packages, delete:packages, admin:repo_hook.

   • Click on “Generate token”

   • You will see a token has been generated with. Usually it looks like ghp_*. Copy this as this will be used as passwords when prompted.

   • In order to securely store the credentials you can store it in the global configuration file. The next time you perform an action that requires authentication, Git will prompt you for your PAT and store it in plaintext in a file under your home directory (~/.git-credentials).

git config --global credential.helper store

1.3.1. A few alternatives to store PAT

Using environemental variables

1. Open your terminal

2. Set your PAT as an environmental variable

bash

export GITHUB_TOKEN=your_personal_access_token

tcsh

setenv GITHUB_TOKEN your_personal_access_token

3. Use the environment variable in your Git commands:

git clone https://$GITHUB_TOKEN@github.com/username/repo.git

Using Git Credential Manager

Windows and macOS

1. Git for Windows includes the Git Credential Manager by default. On macOS, you can install it using Homebrew:

brew tap microsoft/git
brew install --cask git-credential-manager-core

Linux

1. Install the Git Credential Manager Core:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install git-credential-manager-core

2. Configure Git to use the Credential Manager:

git config --global credential.helper manager-core

Now, let us proceed to exercises now.