How do I ensure Git doesn't ask me for my Github username and password?

Question

I am working with a repo on Github. Everytime I try to push something, it asks me for my github username and password. I tried instructions on this page, namely set up the git variables github.user and github.token, but that didn't make any difference. I don't understand why this is happening.

Answer 1

You need to set-up an ssh-agent against which you only need to authenticate once. See this answer over at SO for a howto.

Answer 2

Had a similar problem today: I messed things up in my working copy, so I decided to rename the directory and clone my project again from github. But after doing that, I had to enter my password to do any pull/push request, instead of entering the passphrase just once as I used to.

That was because today I used the https protocol to clone the project! To check what protocol you're using just run

git config -l

and look at the line starting with 'remote.origin.url'.

To switch protocol:

git config remote.origin.url git@github.com:your_username/your_project.git

Just my 2c

Answer 3

When you set up an ssh key for github, if it's not your default key, you will need to add a section to your ~/.ssh/config

Host *github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/github_id_rsa