The other day after having a great cup of coffee from my friends coffee farm in Quillabamba, Peru I got an error in Git saying “Git error: Please tell me who you are”. This happened after I entered my usual Git credentials in my Terminal.
After doing some research I found out that Git made a big change on their way of authorizing users. Now users need to have “a personal access token”. In order to take care of this I had to do the following steps in my Git account:
- First verify my email address(only if you didn’t do it before)
- Go to your account Settings
- Then go to Developer Settings
- And the click on Personal Access Tokens
- Tap on Generate New Token and give it a name
- Give your token an expiration date (Why?)
- Then select the access permissions, scopes and etc.
- Finally, generate new token
Warning: Treat your tokens like passwords and keep them secret. When working with the API, use tokens as environment variables instead of hardcoding them into your programs.
github.com docs
DO NOT forget the above or you will have to do the whole process again!
How to use Git personal token now?
Open your Terminal and run the below. Replace according to your Git repo:
$ git clone https://github.com/yourusername/somerepo.git
Username: your_username
Password: your_token_goes_here (Instead of your password)After following these simple steps I was able to resolve this “Git error: Please tell me who you are” issue. Hope this helps. Contact me if you have questions.
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