Can't clone a github repo on Linux via HTTPS

I'm trying to do a simple git clone https://github.com/org/project.git on a CentOS box but get:

> error: The requested URL returned error: 401 while accessing > https://github.com/org/project.git/info/refs > > fatal: HTTP request failed

It never prompts me for my username/password, just fails.

I can make the exact same call on my Mac no problem- what am I missing?

The answer was simple but not obvious:

Instead of:

git clone https://github.com/org/project.git

do:

git clone https://[email protected]/org/project.git

or (insecure)

git clone https://username:[email protected]/org/project.git

(Note that in the later case, your password will may be visible by other users on your machine by running ps u -u $you and will appear cleartext in your shell's history by default)

All 3 ways work on my Mac, but only the last 2 worked on the remote Linux box. (Thinking back on this, it's probably because I had a global git username set up on my Mac, whereas on the remote box I did not? That might have been the case, but the lack of prompt for a username tripped me up... )

Haven't seen this documented anywhere, so here it is.

You can manual disable ssl verfiy, and try again. :)

git config --global http.sslverify false

I met the same problem, the error message and OS info are as follows

OS info:

>CentOS release 6.5 (Final)

>Linux 192-168-30-213 2.6.32-431.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Nov 22 03:15:09 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

error info:

> Initialized empty Git repository in /home/techops/pyenv/.git/ Password: error: while accessing https://[email protected]/pyenv/pyenv.git/info/refs

>fatal: HTTP request failed

git & curl version info

>git info :git version 1.7.1

>curl 7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.14.0.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2 Protocols: tftp ftp telnet dict ldap ldaps http file https ftps scp sftp Features: GSS-Negotiate IDN IPv6 Largefile NTLM SSL libz

debugging

>$ curl --verbose https://github.com

> * About to connect() to github.com port 443 (#0)

• Trying 13.229.188.59... connected
• Connected to github.com (13.229.188.59) port 443 (#0)
• Initializing NSS with certpath: sql:/etc/pki/nssdb
• CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt CApath: none
• NSS error -12190
• Error in TLS handshake, trying SSLv3... > GET / HTTP/1.1 > User-Agent: curl/7.19.7 (x86_64-redhat-linux-gnu) libcurl/7.19.7 NSS/3.14.0.0 zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.18 libssh2/1.4.2 > Host: github.com > Accept: / >
• Connection died, retrying a fresh connect
• Closing connection #0
• Issue another request to this URL: 'https://github.com';
• About to connect() to github.com port 443 (#0)
• Trying 13.229.188.59... connected
• Connected to github.com (13.229.188.59) port 443 (#0)
• TLS disabled due to previous handshake failure
• CAfile: /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt CApath: none
• NSS error -12286
• Closing connection #0
• SSL connect error curl: (35) SSL connect error

after upgrading curl , libcurl and nss , git clone works fine again, so here it is. the update command is as follows

> sudo yum update -y nss curl libcurl

Make sure you have git 1.7.10 or later, it now prompts for user/password correctly. (You can download the latest version here)

I had to specify user name to work on 1.7.1 git version:

git remote set-url origin https://[email protected]/org/project.git

As JERC said, make sure you have an updated version of git. If you are only using the default settings, when you try to install git you will get version 1.7.1. Other than manually downloading and installing the latest version of get, you can also accomplish this by adding a new repository to yum.

From tecadmin.net:

Download and install the rpmforge repository:

# use this for 64-bit
rpm -i 'http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm'
# use this for 32-bit
rpm -i 'http://pkgs.repoforge.org/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.3-1.el6.rf.i686.rpm'

# then run this in either case
rpm --import http://apt.sw.be/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt

Then you need to enable the rpmforge-extras. Edit /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo and change enabled = 0 to enabled = 1 under [rpmforge-extras]. The file looks like this:

### Name: RPMforge RPM Repository for RHEL 6 - dag
### URL: http://rpmforge.net/
[rpmforge]
name = RHEL $releasever - RPMforge.net - dag
baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el6/en/$basearch/rpmforge
mirrorlist = http://mirrorlist.repoforge.org/el6/mirrors-rpmforge
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge
enabled = 1
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

[rpmforge-extras]
name = RHEL $releasever - RPMforge.net - extras
baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el6/en/$basearch/extras
mirrorlist = http://mirrorlist.repoforge.org/el6/mirrors-rpmforge-extras
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge-extras
enabled = 0 ####### CHANGE THIS LINE TO "enabled = 1" #############
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

[rpmforge-testing]
name = RHEL $releasever - RPMforge.net - testing
baseurl = http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el6/en/$basearch/testing
mirrorlist = http://mirrorlist.repoforge.org/el6/mirrors-rpmforge-testing
#mirrorlist = file:///etc/yum.repos.d/mirrors-rpmforge-testing
enabled = 0
protect = 0
gpgkey = file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-rpmforge-dag
gpgcheck = 1

Once you've done this, then you can update git with

yum update git

I'm not sure why, but they then suggest disabling rpmforge-extras (change back to enabled = 0) and then running yum clean all.

Most likely you'll need to use sudo for these commands.

I was able to get a git 1.7.1 to work after quite some time.

First, I had to do disable SSL just so I could pull:

git config --global http.sslverify false

Then I could clone

git clone https://github.com/USERNAME/PROJECTNAME.git

Then after adding and committing i was UNABLE to push back. So i did

git remote -v

origin	https://github.com/USERNAME/PROJECTNAME.git (fetch)
origin	https://github.com/USERNAME/PROJECTNAME.git (push)

to see the pull and push adresses:

These must be modified with USERNAME@

git remote set-url origin https://[email protected]/USERNAME/PROJECTNAME.git

It will still prompt you for a password, which you could add with

USERNAME:PASSWORD@github.....

But dont do that, as you save your password in cleartext for easy theft.

I had to do this combination since I could not get SSH to work due to firewall limitations.

This is the dumbest answer to this question, but check the status of GitHub. This one got me :)

I had the same problem and error. In my case it was the https_proxy not set. Setting the https_proxy environment variable fixed the issue.

$ export https_proxy=https://<porxy_addres>:<proxy_port>

Example:

$ export https_proxy=https://my.proxy.company.com:8000

Hope this help somebody.