git clone over https 401 error and not asking for username or password

Question

I have a private git repository on Codaset. Normally when I try to clone it over HTTPS on my Windows machine, it asks me for my username and password. When I try to clone it on an Ubuntu server, it never asks me for a username or password and it fails with a 401 error. What do I need to do differently?

Here is what I am doing:

git clone https://codaset.com/username/project_name.git destination_folder_name.git

Answer 1

I got it to work using this format:

https://username:[email protected]/username/project_name.git destination_folder

However according to these 2 posts, using that method could be a security problem:

Can a username and password be sent safely over HTTPS via URL parameters?

Username and password in https url

Answer 2

To avoid having to enter a password at all (on Windows or Unix), you can:

• check that HOME is defined (on Windows, it isn't by default)
• setup a _netrc file with the following content:

    machine codaset.com
    login your_codaset_login
    password your_codaset_password

Note: %HOME%\_netrc on Windows, $HOME/.netrc on Unix

That way, when you are cloning your repo, instead of typing:

 git clone https://[email protected]/username/project_name.git destination_folder_name.git

, you can remove the initial username:

git clone https://codaset.com/username/project_name.git destination_folder_name.git

and you won't have to enter a password.

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If you don't want to put your credentials (in particular your password) in plain text in an .netrc file, you can encrypt that netrc file with gpg: see "Is there a way to skip password typing when using https:// github"