Fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com': No such device or address

Question

I have been deploying my Rails 4 application to Rackspace using github and capistrano for a few weeks now. Everything worked fine until I finally made my repository private. Now, I am receiving the following error after running 'cap deploy':

"fatal: could not read Password for 'https://[email protected]': No such device or address"

Below is the code from my deploy.rb file

set :application, "appname"
set :repository,  "https://[email protected]/git_username/appname.git"
set :scm, :git
set :scm_username, "git_username"
set :scm_passphrase, "git_password"
set :scm_command, "git"
set :keep_releases, 5
set :branch, "master"
set :rails_env, "production"

set :deploy_to, "/var/www/doLocal"

set :user, "deployer"
set :password, "deployer_password"
set :use_sudo, false

ssh_options[:forward_agent] = true

server "/path/to/server", :app, :web, :db, :primary => true

after "deploy:restart", "deploy:cleanup"


namespace :deploy do
  task :start do ; end
  task :stop do ; end
  task :restart, :roles => :app, :except => { :no_release => true } do
     run "#{try_sudo} touch #{File.join(current_path,'tmp','restart.txt')}"
  end
end

I have tried it with and without the username prepended to the github repository name. If it is there, I receive the password error from above, but if it is not there, I receive the following error:

"fatal: could not read Username for 'https://github.com': No such device or address"

Any idea what the issue is? I'm assuming it has something to do with me changing to a private repository. I have read some things about using ssh but have also read not to.

Any suggestions or help would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

So, I figured it out. In order to use a private repo on Github to deploy using https, you need to use Github's OAuth API. Under Edit Profile on your github account, click applications and then generate an OAuth Token. Then, prepend your token to your repo url like so:

 set :repository,  "https://<OAuthToken>@github.com/username/application.git"

After that, I was able to run

 cap deploy

and deploy my application to my remote server.