How do I configure `hub create` SSH credentials?

user_788715 0
Viewed 1182

I have an SSH key configured in github and it's loaded into SSH as far as I know, but when I run hub create I get an error

[:~/already/initialized/repo] $ hub create -p
Error creating repository: Unauthorized (HTTP 401)
Bad credentials

How can I check to see why git seems to be using HTTP, and that it has my SSH key loaded properly?

ssh authentication git
2 Answers

The hub command interacts with GitHub's HTTP API. It doesn't use ssh. You can read about how it handles authentication in the "Configuration" section of the hub man page.

user_1473560

hub does use SSH, but not always.

As seen in commands/clone.go

The ''git:'' protocol will be used for cloning public repositories, while the SSH protocol will be used for private repositories and those that you have push access to.
Alternatively, hub can be configured to use HTTPS protocol for everything.
See "HTTPS instead of git protocol" and "HUB_PROTOCOL" of hub(1).

See issue 1644 Fatal: Could not read Username for "https://github.com"

This is something that is often a cause of confusion for hub users: when doing operations such as hub clone or hub fork … hub push, there are two authentication methods to GitHub in play, and they are in no way related!
One may be fine, but the other one can be misconfigured (or vice versa).

  • The first authentication method is the one git uses for pushing git commits to repos or cloning/fetching from private repos, and is in no way related or affected by hub:
    • SSH
    • HTTPS (with username/password, or PAT, Personal Access Token, if you have 2FA activated)
  • The second authentication method is the one hub uses to access the GitHub API. This is completely separate from git protocol authentication described above, for these reasons:
    • Even if there's an SSH key configured to be used for github.com, it can't be used by hub beause GitHub API can only be accessed over HTTPS.
    • Even if there's a password or Personal Access Token configured in git credential helper for use with HTTPS git remotes, it can't be used by hub in most cases due to the following:
      • Most of the GitHub API cannot be accessed with your actual GitHub password and instead must be accessed with an Oauth token (also known as Personal Access Token);
      • The Personal Access Token configured for cloning/pushing to git repos can't be used for all of the GitHub API operations since they might require permissions outside of the default repo scope that the tokens for git cloning are usually created with.

The GameKyuubi confirms in the comments the fix:

Fixed by deleting ~/.config/hub.
I had a bad/expired token

VonC_63090
Related