Re: More detailed error message for 403 forbidden.

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 28, 2013, 18:36 UTC
Message-ID: <20130328183601.GA11914@sigill.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAFT+Tg_PwAS__AYCwQQZjy4LVvAMZFJuJ+ediDJpRnxx73qMMg@mail.gmail.com>

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 12:29:57PM +0900, Yi, EungJun wrote:

> Currently, if user tried to access a git repository via HTTP and it
> fails because the user's permission is not enough to access the
> repository, git client tells that http request failed and the error
> was 403 forbidden.

The situations in which you'll get a 403 depend on how the server is configured. For instance, on github.com, if you successfully authenticate but are not authorized to access a repository, you get a 404 (we do this to avoid leaking information about which private repositories exist). But we do provide a 403 if you try to access the repository with a non-smart-http client.

So the "403 forbidden" there is not about your account, but about the method; if git is going to give a more verbose message, it needs to be careful not to mislead the user.

Show 8 quoted lines

> It would be much better if git client shows response body which might
> include an explanation of the failure. For example,
> [...]
> $ git clone http://localhost/foo/bar
> error: The requested URL returned error: 403 while accessing
> http://localhost/foo/bar
> remote: User 'me' does not have enough permission to access the repository.
> fatal: HTTP request failed

I agree that is the best way forward, as that means the server is telling us what is going on, and we are not guessing about the meaning of the 403.

One problem is that the content body sent along with the error is not necessarily appropriate for showing to the user (e.g., if it is HTML, it is probably not a good idea to show it on the terminal). So I think we would want to only show it when the server has indicated via the content-type that the message is meant to be shown to the user. I'm thinking the server would generate something like:

   HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
   Content-type: application/x-git-error-message

   User 'me' does not have enough permission to access the repository.

which would produce the example you showed above.

-Peff