Using Personal Access Tokens with GitHub and Git

January 4, 2023

There are situations where accessing GitHub through SSH may not be possible, for example, when a firewall or proxy is blocking access. One way of working with this situation is to access GitHub using HTTP/HTTPS while still using the local git client. This article provides some information on how to access GitHub with the git command-client over HTTPS.

GitHub Documentation

Before beginning, I would point you to the GitHub Documentation on Authentication. Specifically, it is worth looking at the section on authenticating with the command line.

In the section on authenticating with the command line, it describes how to connect via HTTPS. GitHub encourages you to use their GitHub CLI client or the Git Credential Manager to help manage logins. Below I will quickly outline how to use a personal access token to perform the authentication without additional software.

Creating a Personal Access Token

As noted in the GitHub documentation on creating a personal access token, the tokens are effectively sensitive passwords. You don’t want to put them in places where others can get to them. Using a password manager for the token would make some sense or using the GitHub CLI client or the Git Credential Manager mentioned above would reduce some of the security concerns.

Following the information for the link above, I created a "Tokens (classic)" token since they can be used with Git to authenticate over HTTPS. GitHub recommends using an expiration date for a token to limit the damage if it is stolen or otherwise leaked. I used the 90-day token for this example and limited the scope of the token to repo since we are just trying to use Git over HTTPS.

❗	Once you hit the `Generate` button, you will be given the token as a string. This is your only chance to record the token so copy it into a safe place for later use. If you lose it, you will have to generate a new token.

I used a KeePass tool (KeePass, KeePassXC, etc.) to store my personal access token for future use. With a password manager, it will be a little easier to copy the token and use it on the command line then typing it by hand frequently.

Using the Personal Access Token with Git and GitHub

At this point, you can clone the repository by going to the repository in GitHub and using the HTTPS URL to access the repository, for example:

https://github.com/myusername/myusername.github.io.git

You can then modify the repository as usual (git add, git commit, etc.). Then, when you want to git push the repository, it will ask you for your GitHub username and then your GitHub password. For the password, use the recently created GitHub personal token.

Pushing an New Repository to GitHub

If you are trying to push an existing repository to GitHub, you would, for example, use something like the following to set the remote origin on GitHub:

git remote add origin https://github.com/myusername/myusername.github.io.git

before you do the final:

git push -u origin main

to push the new repository to GitHub. At this point, it should ask for your GitHub username and password. The password, of course, is your personal access token created earlier.