How can I save username and password in Git?

Question

I want to use a push and pull automatically in Git Extensions, Sourcetree or any other Git GUI without entering my username and password in a prompt, every time.

So how can I save my credentials in Git?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

You can use the git config to enable credentials storage in Git.

git config --global credential.helper store

When running this command, the first time you pull or push from the remote repository, you'll get asked about the username and password.

Afterwards, for consequent communications with the remote repository you don't have to provide the username and password.

The storage format is a .git-credentials file, stored in plaintext.

Also, you can use other helpers for the git config credential.helper, namely memory cache:

git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=<timeout>'

which takes an optional timeout parameter, determining for how long the credentials will be kept in memory. Using the helper, the credentials will never touch the disk and will be erased after the specified timeout. The default value is 900 seconds (15 minutes).

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Warning: If you use this method, your Git account passwords will be saved in plaintext format, in the global .gitconfig file, e.g in Linux it will be /home/[username]/.gitconfig.

If this is undesirable to you, use an ssh key for your accounts instead.

Answer 3

Recommended and secure method: SSH

Create an SSH GitHub key. Go to github.com → Settings → SSH and GPG keys → New SSH Key. Now save your private key to your computer.

Then, if the private key is saved as id_rsa in the ~/.ssh/ directory, we add it for authentication as such:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

A more secure method: Caching

We can use git-credential-cache to cache our username and password for a time period. Simply enter the following in your CLI (terminal or command prompt):

git config --global credential.helper cache

You can also set the timeout period (in seconds) as such:

git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'