TIL credential.helper which makes life easier when authenticating to remote

credential.helper

credential.helper is a git configuration which allows you to provide username and passwords to git. This is essential when you need to perform operations against a remote like pulling or pushing code.

Basically you define something like this:

git config credential.https://example.com.username myusername
git config credential.helper "$helper $options"

Git will use that to authenticate to your remote before performing any remote action.

Using callbacks

$helper is a callback function or a shell command. This is really cool because you can define something like this in your .gitconfig:

[credential "https://github.com"]
        helper =
        helper = !/usr/bin/gh auth git-credential
[credential "https://gist.github.com"]
        helper =
        helper = !/usr/bin/gh auth git-credential

And git is going to call Github CLI to retrieve credentials. So you don’t need to worry anymore about keeping PAT token anymore!

To make this work you’ll require to have gh cli installed and call gh auth login before this can work