Store git credentials for UBC CS server

You’re taking a CS course at UBC and just finished a chunk of work that you wanna commit.

When you try to git push or git pull, you’re asked to type in username and password

ex_git_push

(Green line is to cover up my CS id)

This guide will show how you can use git config to cache your authentification info

Saving credentials

git have this nice feature called credentials that let you store authentication credentials for git servers (like our stash.ugrad.cs.ubc.ca for UBC)

We’ll be using cache option which will store the credentials in memory.

Run the following command to enable this git option:

# 10368000 is 4 months in seconds
# With this config, git will remove credential from memory after 4 months
git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=10368000'

You can check that this config is enabled by running the following command:

# Should return output like this
# [credentials]
#        helper = cache --timeout=10368000
cat ~/.gitconfig

Now if you type in git credentials via git push or git pull, it will be stored in memory so you don’t have to type everytime you push

Saving credentials permanently

If you want to save the password permanently in the system, you can use store option like in the following command:

git config --global credential.helper store

However note that once you type credentials for git server, the credentials will be stored in ~/.git-credentials file as plain text file! Hence I recommend the cache option

Hope it helps!