Shell gets stuck in a loop if private git repo and using https without authentication

[pgilad]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Use a git with https and no authentication (or cache of authentication)
2. Be in a private git repo. (where authentication is required for read)

Shell then asks for git username, but anything you enter is evaluated as a zsh command, meaning you can't even try to actually login.

I think that the solution would be to detect if user doesn't have read permissions in a git repo - and then don't try to async evaluate remote git status (for git pull/push).

Hope that makes sense... Ran into this issue in several colleagues workspace where they used https in private repos.

[sindresorhus]

Yeah, that makes sense. Any idea how to detect that?

[pgilad]

I'm currently looking into it... It seems one needs to play with git ls-remote in order to detect read access to a repo. Still learning...

The problematic line is git fetch btw...

edit - just updating that I currently didn't find any workable solution for this (except for caching credentials or switching to a git:// or not using private repos)

[MoOx]

Just got this issue as well.

What about using github api (without auth) to detect if a repo is private (cause without auth you will be able to just see public repo) & use a cache somewhere to save this ?

As a workaround, to avoid loop, when username is prompted I just use a git pull to get an real prompt.

[stephen304]

Using github api would only work when the repo is github. I have lots of repos scattered about on bitbucket, gitlab, and my uni's enterprise github. This serverfault question suggests redirectiong the stdout somehow, not sure if it helps:

http://serverfault.com/questions/544156/git-clone-fail-instead-of-prompting-for-credentials

[fregante]

I'm not sure if it's the same issue, but when git expects input, I get a prompt I can't answer:

Anything you type is considered a normal command, it doesn't answer the prompt.

I solved the issues by causing those prompts separately (e.g. git pull) but it was confusing for a bit

[sindresorhus]

Not going to make it GitHub specific.

Pure is already running non-interactively so nothing should be prompted. Happy to receive a PR with a fix but I have no idea how to fix this.

[MoOx]

Maybe a comment in a FAQ section in the README is a start :) (quick fix: type git pull to auth)

[sindresorhus]

@MoOx Sure, if you care enough to do a PR.

[sindresorhus]

This has been fixed in git 2.3 :D

See: f43ab97

[MoOx]

Very nice.

[fkirkholt]

I still get this error on my Mac with git version 2.3.5.

[madeleinedaly]

Same here, running pure prompt 0.5.1 on Yosemite with git 2.3.5.

[mafredri]

@fkirkholt @dalymatthew are you sure you aren't resetting the GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT environment variable after pure has been initialized? Mind checking

echo $GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT

?

[madeleinedaly]

~
λ echo $GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT
0

My ~/.zshrc and ~/.zshrc.local are just stock grml, apart from the following in the latter:

autoload -U promptinit && promptinit
PURE_PROMPT_SYMBOL=λ
prompt pure

I double-checked and GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT isn't getting reset anywhere.

[mafredri]

Well, then I'm out of ideas. Unable to reproduce.

[neonstalwart]

by running the commands in pure.zsh one at a time i found this one to be the one which prompts:

> command git -c gc.auto=0 fetch &>/dev/null

is it a git bug?

[mafredri]

@neonstalwart either command git --version is < 2.3 or GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT is not set to zero. Besides that, &>/dev/null is supposed to swallow all output, so no clue.

[neonstalwart]

@mafredri git version is 2.4 and GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT is 0 - with that exact command above i see a prompt for a password. i'm trying to make sense of it.

[mafredri]

Tried upgrading to 2.4.0, still cannot reproduce:

❯ GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 command git -c gc.auto=0 fetch
fatal: could not read Password for 'https://[email protected]': terminal prompts disabled

[neonstalwart]

so, in my case it was ssh which was prompting for the password. my remote is actually [email protected]:path/to/repo.git

> GIT_TRACE=true GIT_TERMINAL_PROMPT=0 command git -c gc.auto=0 fetch
11:54:32.597755 git.c:348               trace: built-in: git 'fetch'
11:54:32.600003 run-command.c:347       trace: run_command: 'ssh' '[email protected]' 'git-upload-pack '\''path/to/repo.git'\'''
Password:

updated ~/.ssh/config with the following and it stops prompting now

Host git.XXXXX.com
    KbdInteractiveAuthentication no
    ChallengeResponseAuthentication no
    PasswordAuthentication no

[ghost]

I am not sure if this is exactly the same issue (or whether this is even fixed for everyone), but I was having a similar problem while running a git clone. This is how I fixed it:

set -x GIT_ASKPASS /bin/echo

which translated to bash gives

export GIT_ASKPASS=/bin/echo