# Authentication with e-mail address as user name for HTTPS remote 2 messages from 2013-08-31 to 2013-08-31. Participants: Patrick Atoon, Jeff King. Thread: https://gitlist.dev/t/34816 ## Patrick Atoon, 2013-08-31 06:52 Subject: Authentication with e-mail address as user name for HTTPS remote Message-ID: URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/CADZGgi9-nLpcaHQOevBnY9HZtkLD6Zn%3DgCZq8u5yefPV7gYaTg%40mail.gmail.com ``` Hello, I run into a problem with command line git on Linux. The remote git server I try to clone from uses HTTPS as a protocol and requires full fledged e-mail addresses for a user name in its authentication. In TortoiseGit (with winstore) or SourceTree, the user name and password are asked and stored. But on the command line I'm stuck, unable to provide the user name. Here is what happens. First try cloning without specifying the user name: ---8<------------------------------------------------------- $ git clone https://git.server.com/git/test.git Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/git/test/.git/ error: The requested URL returned error: 401 Authorization Required while accessing https://git.server.com/git/test.git/nfo/refs fatal: HTTP request failed ---8<------------------------------------------------------- I couldn't find a "--username" flag or something similar for the git command, so my next try was to incorporate the user name in the URL, basic auth style. The repo URL looks something like this: https://user.email@emaildomain.com@git.server.com/git/test.git Note the double "@" there, it is bound to cause trouble. This is what happened: ---8<------------------------------------------------------- $ git clone https://user.email@emaildomain.com@git.server.com/git/test.git Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/git/test/.git/ Password: error: Couldn't resolve host 'emaildomain.com@git.server.com' while accessing https://user.email@emaildomain.com@git.server.com/git/test.git/info/refs fatal: HTTP request failed ---8<------------------------------------------------------- It appears the "@" was picked up as an indication that the URL contains the username, however the URL was split at the wrong position. The splitting algorithm doesn't seem to take into account that a user name might contain an "@". My request: please modify command line git to support full fledged e-mail addresses as user names in HTTPS requests. I'm not a C adept, still I browsed the code a bit and bumped into "transport.c"'s "transport_anonymize_url" method. I think that code could be modified to do a better job of splitting the URL, which might then avoid problems down the line. Thanks for reading this far. Regards, Patrick ``` ## Jeff King, 2013-08-31 08:09 Subject: Re: Authentication with e-mail address as user name for HTTPS remote Message-ID: <20130831080946.GB21744@sigill.intra.peff.net> URL: https://gitlist.dev/e/20130831080946.GB21744%40sigill.intra.peff.net In-Reply-To: ``` On Sat, Aug 31, 2013 at 08:52:06AM +0200, Patrick Atoon wrote: > Here is what happens. First try cloning without specifying the user name: > > ---8<------------------------------------------------------- > $ git clone https://git.server.com/git/test.git > Initialized empty Git repository in /tmp/git/test/.git/ > error: The requested URL returned error: 401 Authorization Required > while accessing > https://git.server.com/git/test.git/nfo/refs > > fatal: HTTP request failed That should be prompting you. What version of git are you using? > I couldn't find a "--username" flag or something similar for the git > command, so my next try was to incorporate the user name in the URL, > basic auth style. Yes, that's the correct way to do it from the command line. If you are running v1.7.9 and later, you can also put this in your config: [credential "https://git.server.com"] username = user.email@emaildomain.com to automatically use that username for the particular domain. > https://user.email@emaildomain.com@git.server.com/git/test.git > > Note the double "@" there, it is bound to cause trouble. Yes. You probably want to escape it like: https://user.email%40emaildomain.com@git.server.com/git/test.git In theory we could parse from the right-hand side of the hostname and realize that only the right-most "@" is the username separator (under the assumption that hostnames can never contain an "@"). I don't know if that would violate the standard or not. However, it is not even git that does the actual parsing in this case, but rather libcurl. -Peff ```