Tag Archives: git

Always prefer accessing GitHub over SSH than HTTPS

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This is to avoid accidentally cloning a repo as read-only when GitHub defaults to HTTPS links, and then having to edit the gitconfig later to get an SSH URL you can push to. Add these 2 lines to your global .gitconfig file in your home folder to override all github.com URLs from HTTPS to SSH:

[url "ssh://git@github.com/"]
     insteadOf = https://github.com/

Why though?

Note, this is not for all git remotes, only GitHub. I have a similar setting for the GitHub Enterprise instance we use at work. Generally though, for most remote servers I’m fine with whatever it gives me, which is usually HTTPS.

The difference becomes important if I ever want to contribute (i.e. push) to the cloned repo, as is mostly the case when cloning my own repos or work code. Continue reading →

Fixing a typo across multiple repos

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Yesterday I found a typo in a pull request description while browsing another team’s project which I stumbled upon. I mentioned it to the author but it turned out that that part of the text came from the repository’s pull request template, which means every pull request will have this amusing but irritating mistake. I sent them a pull request, modifying the template, to fix the mistake at the source and avoid it in future, and thought that would be the end of it.

It turns out that template was written once and then copied across to new repos, which means this typo actually exists in almost all the pull requests in all of that team’s projects. Well that escalated quickly. This is the point where the average person probably says “OK whatever, it’s not worth it for something so small, there are too many repos, it’s just a small typo, never mind” and stop. A very determined person might actually start opening browser tabs and psyching themselves up to do pull requests. I open my terminal emulator and start writing a for loop. Continue reading →