RE: OAuth2 support in git?

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On June 14, 2018 11:15 AM, Jeff King wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 14, 2018 at 10:13:42AM +0000, brian m. carlson wrote:
> 
> > > I know that other git server environments like github support that
> > > on client side by allowing tokens to be used as usernames in a BASIC
> > > authentication flow. We could do the same but I am asking whether
> > > there is also a way to transport tokens in a standard conform
> > > "Authorization: Bearer ..." Header field.
> >
> > There isn't any support for Bearer authentication in Git.  For HTTP,
> > we use libcurl, which doesn't provide this natively.  While it could
> > in theory be added, it would require some reworking of the auth code.
> >
> > You are, of course, welcome to send a patch.
> 
> If it's just a custom Authorization header, we should be able to support it
> with existing curl versions without _too_ much effort.
> 
> I think there are probably two possible directions:
> 
>  1. add a special "bearer" command line option, etc, as a string
> 
>  2. add a boolean option to send the existing "password" field as a
>     "bearer" header
> 
> I suspect (2) would fit in with the existing code better, as the special case
> would mostly be limited to the manner in which we feed the credential to
> curl. And you could probably just set a config option for "this url's auth will
> be oauth2", and use the existing mechanisms for providing the password.
> 
> We'd maybe also want to allow credential helpers to say "by the way, this
> password should be treated as a bearer token", for cases where you might
> sometimes use oauth2 and sometimes a real password.

Be aware that there are 4 (ish) flavours of OAuth2 the last time I checked. It is important to know which one (or all) to implement. The embedded form is probably the easiest to comprehend - and the least implemented from my research. More common OAuth2 instances use a third-man website to hold session keys and authorization. That may be problematic for a whole bunch of us who do not play in that world.

Cheers,
Randall

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