How to Store Your Github Https Password on Linux in a Terminal Keychain

How can I save username and password in Git?

Attention: This method saves the credentials in plaintext on your PC's disk. Everyone on your computer can access it, e.g. malicious NPM modules.

Run

git config --global credential.helper store

then

git pull

provide a username and password and those details will then be remembered later. The credentials are stored in a file on the disk, with the disk permissions of "just user readable/writable" but still in plaintext.

If you want to change the password later

git pull

Will fail, because the password is incorrect, git then removes the offending user+password from the ~/.git-credentials file, so now re-run

git pull

to provide a new password so it works as earlier.

Is there a way to cache https credentials for pushing commits?

Since Git 1.7.9 (released 2012), there is a neat mechanism in Git to avoid having to type your password all the time for HTTP / HTTPS, called credential helpers.

You can just use one of the following credential helpers:

git config --global credential.helper cache

The credential.helper cache value tells Git to keep your password cached in memory for a particular amount of minutes. The default is 15 minutes, you can set a longer timeout with:

# Cache for 1 hour
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=3600"

# Cache for 1 day
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=86400"

# Cache for 1 week
git config --global credential.helper "cache --timeout=604800"

You can also store your credentials permanently if so desired, see the other answers below.

GitHub's help also suggests that if you're on Mac OS X and used Homebrew to install Git, you can use the native Mac OS X keystore with:

git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

For Windows, there is a helper called Git Credential Manager for Windows or wincred in msysgit.

git config --global credential.helper wincred # obsolete

With Git for Windows 2.7.3+ (March 2016):

git config --global credential.helper manager

For Linux, you would use (in 2011) gnome-keyring(or other keyring implementation such as KWallet).

Nowadays (2020), that would be (on Linux)

Fedora

sudo dnf install git-credential-libsecret
git config --global credential.helper /usr/libexec/git-core/git-credential-libsecret

Ubuntu

sudo apt-get install libsecret-1-0 libsecret-1-dev
cd /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/libsecret
sudo make
git config --global credential.helper /usr/share/doc/git/contrib/credential/libsecret/git-credential-libsecret

Where to store my Git personal access token?

Half the point of passwords is that (ideally) you memorize them and the system hashes them, so therefore they're never stored anywhere in plain text.

Yet GitHub's personal access token system seems to basically force you to store the token in plain text?

First, a PAT (Personal Access Token) is not a simple password, but an equivalent that:

you can generate multiple time (for instance, one per machine from which you need to access GitHub repository)
you can revoke at any time (from the GitHub web interface), which makes that PAT obsolete, even if it lingers around on one of those machines.

That differs from your password, which is unique to your account, and cannot be easily changed without having to also modify it everywhere you happen to use it.

Since a PAT can be used in place of a password when performing Git operations over HTTPS with Git on the command line or the API, you can use a git credential helper to cache it securely.

On Windows, for instance, that would use the Windows Credential Manager, through the GCM -- Git Credential Manager -- for Windows, Mac or Linux:

git config --global credential.helper manager-core

The first time you are pushing to a repo, a popup will ask for your credentials: username and your PAT.

The next time, it won't ask, and reuse directly that PAT, which remains stored securely in your Credential Manager.

A similar idea applies for Mac with the OSX keychain, and Linux with the GNOME Keyring (in 2021, it would need a DBus session and libsecret), but in 2021, GCM-Core covers those use cases.

The idea remains: store the PAT in an encrypted credentials store.

As mentioned above, the more modern solution (Q4 2020) is Microsoft Git-Credential-Manager-Core

git config --global credential.helper manager-core

You need for that to install git-credential-manager-core, downloading its latest release, like gcmcore-linux_amd64.2.0.474.41365.deb

sudo dpkg -i <path-to-package>
git-credential-manager-core configure

Although, with GCM (Git-Credential-Manager-Core) on Linux, as noted by Mekky Mayata in the comments, you need to define a git config --global credential.credentialStore first.

See "Credential stores on Linux":

There are four options for storing credentials that Git Credential Manager (GCM) manages on Linux platforms:
freedesktop.org Secret Service API
GPG/pass compatible files
Git's built-in credential cache
Plaintext files
By default, GCM comes not configured.

You can select which credential store to use by setting the GCM_CREDENTIAL_STORE environment variable, or the credential.credentialStore Git configuration setting.

As noted by agent18 in the comments, using git-credential-libsecret after installing libsecret-1-0 and libsecret-1-dev is a good first step.

But, again, that should be now wrapped by credential-manager-core.

Authentication to GitHub using personal access token on macOS?

Step 1

Copy this into your terminal to unset any existing GitHub login credentials:

git config --global --unset credential.helper
git credential-osxkeychain erase
host=github.com
protocol=https

Step 2

Open a new terminal window, and set the name and email for commits:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email you@example.com

Step 3

Run a git push or git clone a private repository so GitHub prompts you to enter your username and password.

For the username, simply enter your email.

For the password paste in your token (i.e. copy the token from GitHub website where you created it and paste it in).

Note: to generate a new access token, go to GitHub, click on your profile pic on the top right -> Settings -> Developer Settings -> Personal Access Tokens -> Tokens (classic) and create a new one (95% of the time you'll just want full 'repos' permissions and nothing more, unless you do some fancier things via the command line).

How do I update the password for Git?

To fix this on macOS, you can use

git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

A username and password prompt will appear with your next Git action (pull, clone, push, etc.).

For Windows, it's the same command with a different argument:

git config --global credential.helper wincred

Git keeps prompting me for a password

I think you may have the wrong Git repository URL.

Open .git/config and find the [remote "origin"] section. Make sure you're using the SSH one:

ssh://git@github.com/username/repo.git

You can see the SSH URL in the main page of your repository if you click Clone or download and choose ssh.

And NOT the https or git one:

https://github.com/username/repo.git
git://github.com/username/repo.git

You can now validate with just the SSH key instead of the username and password.

If Git complains that 'origin' has already been added, open the .config file and edit the url = "..." part after [remote origin] as url = ssh://github/username/repo.git

The same goes for other services. Make sure the address looks like: protocol://something@url

E.g. .git/config for Azure DevOps:

[remote "origin"]
    url = https://mystore@dev.azure.com/mystore/myproject/
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

How do you reset the stored credentials in 'git credential-osxkeychain'?

The solution turned out to be this:

The command git credential-osxkeychain was using the first GitHub account entry in my keychain. This one was not the one that had access to the projects in question.

I resolved the problem by touching the account in Keychain Access so that its date changed (I think I just changed the comment) and now that it became the most recent GitHub account it became the first one returned to credential-osxkeychain, and thus everything worked.

A better form of support for multiple GitHub accounts would be nice, but it is likely that most people only have one primary account and don't run into this problem.

SSH Key - Still asking for password and passphrase

If you work with HTTPs urls, it'll always ask for your username / password. This could be solved using @Manavalan Gajapathy's comment (copying here):

See this github doc to convert remote's URL from https to ssh. To check if remote's URL is ssh or https, use git remote -v. To switch from https to ssh:

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

If you're correctly using SSH when cloning / setting remotes: make sure you have a ssh-agent to remember your password (see this answer by @Komu). That way, you'll only enter your passphrase once by terminal session.

If it is still too annoying, then simply set a ssh-key without passphrase.