concept password in category git

This is an excerpt from Manning's book Git in Practice. Login to get full access to this book.

Run git push --set-upstream origin master, and enter your GitHub username and password when requested. The output should resemble the following.

Listing 2.2. Output: pushing and setting an upstream branch

and are for your GitHub account. They may only be asked for the first time you push to a repository, depending on your operating system of choice (which may decide to save the password for you). They’re always required to push to repositories but are only required for fetch when fetching from private repositories.

After setting this, the next time you clone a private GitHub repository and ask for a password, you’ll be prompted whether to allow git-credential-osxkeychain access to your keychain. You should allow this, and then passwords will be stored and retrieved from here in future. This is useful on OS X, because otherwise Git may prompt for the same passwords multiple times or write them unencrypted to disk.