On Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 02:36:13PM -0700, Chris Chow wrote: > There appears to be a small inconsistency / bug in the documentation > located at https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials. I'm not sure I see what you mean. > Under the "Custom Helpers" subhead, there's a line that reads > > Generally speaking, rule (3) above is the simplest for users to specify. Authors of credential helpers should make an effort to assist their users by naming their program "git-credential-$NAME", and putting it in the $PATH or $GIT_EXEC_PATH during installation, which will allow a user to enable it with git config credential.helper $NAME. OK, so here you'd call your helper git-credential-gcloud.sh so that: git config credential.helper gcloud.sh would work. > Earlier in the document, under "Configuration Options > helper", there > is a line that reads > > The name of an external credential helper, and any associated options. If the helper name is not an absolute path, then the string git credential- is prepended And likewise here, we will run "git credential-gcloud.sh", which in turn calls "git-credential-gcloud.sh" (since there is no builtin of that name). But we would never call "credential-gcloud.sh" in this way. You could say: git config credential.helper '!credential-gcloud.sh' of course, but that is skipping the auto-name stuff entirely. > I think the latter text is correct. The maintainers of the google > cloud SDK followed the advice in the first part, naming their cred > helper `git-credential-gcloud.sh`, which is not accessible if you set > the custom credential helper to `gcloud.sh`. I had to make a symlink > at `credential-gcloud.sh`, following the instructions in the latter > block, to make it work. One could of course just specify the full path > in .gitconfig, but I figured it might be good to have these parts be > consistent anyways. Both pieces of text are pointing to the name that the gcloud folks used. I'm not sure why it didn't work, or how a symlink could possibly have helped. Can you share the exact sequence of commands, with output, that shows what you're seeing? Here's a toy example that shows the kind of thing that should work: # toy helper that lets us know when it's running { echo '#!/bin/sh' && echo 'echo >&2 running the foo helper'; } >foo.sh chmod +x foo.sh # add our current directory to PATH to experiment; usually these # commands would go into /usr/local/bin, ~/bin, etc export PATH=$PATH:$PWD # make sure we're in a repo so we can stick our config somewhere. In # the real world you'd probably be using "git config --global" or # similar. git init git config credential.helper foo.sh # this should say "credential-foo.sh is not a git command", because we # tried to run "git credential-foo.sh", but that doesn't exist (the # command itself is a noop; it just tries to remove a bogus credential # that you don't actually have, but that's enough to trigger each # helper). echo url=https://user:pass@xxxxxxxxxxx | git credential reject # now try it again with credential-foo.sh in the path. That also won't # work, with the same outcome. mv foo.sh credential-foo.sh echo url=https://user:pass@xxxxxxxxxxx | git credential reject # now try it with git-credential-foo.sh in the path. This should # trigger the helper successfully. mv credential-foo.sh git-credential-foo.sh echo url=https://user:pass@xxxxxxxxxxx | git credential reject What I'm suspecting is that the "credential-foo.sh is not a git command" message may have confused you, and then while debugging it you did something else (e.g., tweaking your PATH, setting the execute bit, etc) that led the original git-credential-gcloud.sh to work. -Peff
