Category: Git

Logging on to Git (on z/OS)

I’ve gradually been moving away from being 100% ISPF, and moving to OMVS. I use SSH terminals to access the Command Line Interface (CLI) just like I use on Linux, and I do most of my editing with VScode on Linux accessing the files on z/OS over sshfs so they look as if they are in a local Linux directory.

I wanted to use Git on z/OS. It was easy to install and start using, but I had problems logging on to Git.

As I understand it there are several ways of logging on to Git. I’ve used two, HTTPS and SSH.

HTTPS

You can logon to Git with a userid and a Personal Access Token. A PAT is like a sophisticated password. To get a PAT, go to your Git home page, click on your photo, and click settings. On the public profile page which is displayed, at the bottom of the left hand column is<> Developer settings. Click on this link. Click on Personal access tokens.

Click on Tokens (classic) -> Generate new token (classic). You have to verify, so I clicked send code via email. Copy the PAT.

When you create a new PAT you can specify what the token can do, for example

  • full control of the private repository, or just access the public repository, or access the commit state.
  • can control the public keys
  • delete repositories

Click on generate token. A token is displayed such as ghp_7OSehXd6lP1234Gy0KRvqpmABALX8L618ycad. Copy this and save it somewhere securely. If you lose it, it is easy to delete and create another.

If you use Git using https, for example https://github.com/colinpaiceABC/ColinsRepo it will prompt for userid (colinpaiceABC) and password. Password means use a PAT.

You can store the userid and PAT for scripts etc to use to logon.

When you create the PAT you specify the validity period, for example two weeks, so you will need to have a process in place to renew the token.

SSH

You can logon to Git using SSH. Because keys are stored on your local machine, and on the Git server, you do not need to enter userid and password/PAT each time.

Git has excellent documentation on using ssh.

You need an SSH key. Check in directory ~/ssl, for files like id_….pub I have id_ed25519.pub and id_rsa.pub . If you do not have a key, follow the git documentation to create one.

Once I had my key I used the documentation on how to add it to Git.

Check you are using the ….pub file. It looks like

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAA...XX/Xk colin@ColinNew

Add it using picture -> settings -> SSH and GPG keys ….

To use this you access Git via 

git clone git@github.com/colinpaicemq/MQTools.git

If it doesn’t work as expected.

I got into a mess because I used

git clone https://github.com/colinpaicemq/MQTools.git

to clone the repository. When I tried to update the repository it asked me for userid and password!

You can change whether you use HTTPS or SSH to logon. For example to set SSH

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:colinpaicetest/testrepro.git

See the documentation.