Preserving credentials on authentication failures

2 messages, 2 authors, 2022-09-21 · open the first message on its own page

Preserving credentials on authentication failures

From: Jan Tosovsky <hidden>
Date: 2022-09-20 08:00:58

On my local Windows machine I maintain a credential store in the form of a
text file. But from time to time one of the entries disappears. I run
regularly some background jobs, cloning some stuff, and I suspect this
happens when the external authentication service is down temporarily. When
it is later resumed, I can't clone the repo anymore because of that deleted
entry.

Is there any option to keep entries on authentication failures? Or is this
simply a bug? Or is there another reason why this happens?

Git 2.35.1.windows.2

Thanks, Jan

Re: Preserving credentials on authentication failures

From: brian m. carlson <hidden>
Date: 2022-09-21 21:13:25

On 2022-09-20 at 07:59:38, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
On my local Windows machine I maintain a credential store in the form of a
text file. But from time to time one of the entries disappears. I run
regularly some background jobs, cloning some stuff, and I suspect this
happens when the external authentication service is down temporarily. When
it is later resumed, I can't clone the repo anymore because of that deleted
entry.

Is there any option to keep entries on authentication failures? Or is this
simply a bug? Or is there another reason why this happens?
If you have a credential helper and the credentials retrieved from it
cause the server to send a 401, then Git will erase the credentials and
ask for new ones.  If your auth service is down, then the best thing for
your Git server to do is return a 503 if service cannot be maintained.
If it returns a 401 (which is not correct according to the RFC), then
Git will clear the credentials.

Git doesn't provide an option to preserve entries on authentication
failure, but you could write a simple shell script that wraps your
normal credential helper and ignores the "erase" command and use that
instead in `credential.helper`.
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Toronto, Ontario, CA
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