Authentication failed to bitbucket

Question

I'm trying to push my project via the https protocol on bitbucket using sourcetree.
But I can't connect to bitbucket with my login and password (which work on the website), I have a fatal error : "Authentication failed".

I read on other posts I can work around the problem using the ssh protocol instead of the https one, so I set up a ssh key following instructions on the source tree faq. But now I don't know how I can change to the ssh protocol when I want to push my code. Someone know how I can do this ? Thank you.

Answer 1

If you got authentication issues with the GIT console, you can try to switch your configuration to HTTPS and specify user & password with the following command :

https://<username>:<password>@bitbucket.org/<username>/<repo>.git 

BUT CAREFUL: Coming back to this answer that I made a very long time ago, I want to give credits to @ChristopherPickslay for pointing out that the password is stored as clear text in the .git/config file.

If you want to roll with HTTPS, you can securely store your password with Git credential manager

But personnally, I now always use SSH authentification, as it seems to be a better practice, because you use a personal pair of public/private keys that will prevent your password to be stored outside. Apart from the fact you can put a passphrase on your key, and then you also need to store the password on a credential manager or ssh-agent.

Answer 2

I recently had a similar issue with SourceTree: any time I tried to push/pull/fetch to/from the remote origin I would get an authentication error (using SourceTree with Stash). Sometimes I would be challenge in Stash with a CAPTCHA but it never made a difference if I provided the correct information or not.

For me, we're using SourceTree and Stash in a corporate environment; user accounts are based on network credentials. Part of our network security requires us to change those passwords on a regular basis.

I was operating under the assumption that SourceTree/Stash was "aware" of any change made to my network password. But apparently -- at least in this instance -- it was not.

To fix, all I needed to do was:

Tools > Options > Authentication > Edit (Edit Password)

I set the password to match my current network password and everything began working as expected.

Not sure if this helps the OP but I hope it may help someone else looking for answers to a similar issue.