Bash - clone git repository providing username and password directly when running (as command option or in URL)

In this short article, we would like to show how to clone git repository providing username and password when running using Bash.

Quick solution:

git clone https://username:password@github.com/username/repository.git

Hint: do not forget to encode username and password when they contains URLs special characters. 

Possible cases

password is optional in URL syntax, so by using:

git clone https://username@github.com/username/repository.git

we will be asked to type password while command is executed.

Practical example

In practice username and password should be encoded. In this section you can find JavaScript's encodeURIComponent() function equivalent.

#!/bin/bash

function create_utf8_code() {
	local code="$(echo -n "$1" | xxd -ps)"
	local length="${#code}"
	local i
	for (( i = 0; i < length; i += 2 ))
	do
		echo -n "%${code:$i:2}" | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]'
	done
}

function encode_uri_component() {
	local text="${1}"
	local length="${#text}"
	local i char
	for (( i = 0; i < length; ++i ))
	do
		char="${text:$i:1}"
		[[ "$char" =~ [-_.!~*\'()a-zA-Z0-9] ]] && echo -n "$char" || create_utf8_code "$char"
	done
}


encoded_username="$(encode_uri_component "username")"
encoded_password="$(encode_uri_component "P@$$word")"

git clone "https://$encoded_username:$encoded_password@github.com/username/repository.git"

See also

1. Bash - JavaScript encodeURIComponent equivalent