How do I check whether I have access to a repository without cloning?

Question

I have some code where people submit git repo links. The repo may be served over HTTPS with no authentication or HTTPS with basic authentication. I want to check programmatically whether if I have access to the repo. I don’t want to run git clone because it could be time-consuming to download the entire history. I’m trying to find the fastest way to test authentication.

Answer 1

One route is git ls-remote as in

$ if git ls-remote https://github.com/git/git.git >/dev/null ; then echo got it ; fi
got it