Credential Caching for Wrist-Friendly Git Usage

Smart HTTP is The Future™

A while back, we launched Smart HTTP
support for GitHub; this
transport for pushing changes to GitHub has a number of benefits over the
SSH-based approach, especially for Windows users. The biggest benefit is,
instead of setting up an SSH key, you can just type your GitHub username and
password.

Credential Caching in Git – Don’t Make Me Type!

However, this approach has always had one major drawback – you have to type
your username / password every time, which can get to be a little annoying.
One of our users, Andrew Nurse, has come up with a
great utility that utilizes Git 1.7.9’s HTTPS Credential
Caching support to
provide a native password cache for Windows.

With this tool installed, you will only have to type your password once,
until you change it. This utility is compatible with GitHub, as well as
any other Git repository that supports the Smart HTTP protocol.

Installing the application is easy – just unzip it and double-click the EXEs.
Included along with this zip file is
GitPad,
another helpful utility that changes the Git default commit message editor to
whatever your system uses to edit text files (usually Notepad).

• git-credential-winstore and
  GitPad
  for Windows Vista / Windows 7 (.NET 3.5 required)
• git-credential-winstore and
  GitPad
  for Windows 8 (.NET 4.0 required)
• The git-credential-winstore source code

(Note that there is no functional difference between the two, only .NET
Framework versions)

Where’s the Mac version?

Git Core ships the source code to a sample credential store that uses the
native OS X credential cache APIs. Grab the binary
here,
put it in /usr/local/bin, and run the command git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain to enable it.

Written by

Anaïs Betts

@anaisbetts