docs: discuss caching personal access tokens
Describe problems storing personal access tokens in git-credential-cache and suggest alternatives. Research suggests that many users are confused about this: > the point of passwords is that (ideally) you memorise them [so] > they're never stored anywhere in plain text. Yet GitHub's personal > access token system seems to basically force you to store the token in > plain text? https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46645843/where-to-store-my-git-personal-access-token#comment89963004_46645843 Signed-off-by: M Hickford <mirth.hickford@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
M Hickford committed
Jan 10, 2025 at 22:54 UTC
a90ff409f0490aef6266f17656fa626154af9715
1 file changed
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Documentation/git-credential-cache.txt
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@@ -78,6 +78,23 @@ variable (this example increases the cache time to 1 hour):
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$ git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'
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-------------------------------------------------------
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+PERSONAL ACCESS TOKENS
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+----------------------
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+
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+Some remotes accept personal access tokens, which are randomly
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+generated and hard to memorise. They typically have a lifetime of weeks
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+or months.
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+
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+git-credential-cache is inherently unsuitable for persistent storage of
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+personal access tokens. The credential will be forgotten after the cache
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+timeout. Even if you configure a long timeout, credentials will be
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+forgotten if the daemon dies.
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+
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+To avoid frequently regenerating personal access tokens, configure a
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+credential helper with persistent storage. Alternatively, configure an
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+OAuth credential helper to generate credentials automatically. See
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+linkgit:gitcredentials[7], sections "Available helpers" and "OAuth".
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+
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GIT
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---
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Part of the linkgit:git[1] suite