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credential doc: make multiple-helper behavior more prominent
Git's configuration system works by reading multiple configuration files in order, from general to specific: - first, the system configuration /etc/gitconfig - then the user's configuration (~/.gitconfig or ~/.config/git/config) - then the repository configuration (.git/config) For single-valued configuration items, the latest value wins. For multi-valued configuration items, values accumulate in that order. For example, this allows setting a credential helper globally in ~/.gitconfig that git will try to use in all repositories, regardless of whether they additionally provide another helper. This is usually a nice thing --- e.g. I can install helpers to use my OS keychain and to cache credentials for a short period of time globally. Sometimes people want to be able to override an inherited setting. For the credential.helper setting, this is done by setting the configuration item to empty before giving it a new value. This is already documented but the documentation is hard to find --- git-config(1) says to look at gitcredentials(7) and the config reference in gitcredentials(7) doesn't mention this issue. Move the documentation to the config reference to make it easier to find. Signed-off-by: Jonathan Nieder <[email protected]> Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <[email protected]>
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Documentation/gitcredentials.txt

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@@ -101,16 +101,6 @@ $ git help credential-foo
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$ git config --global credential.helper foo
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-------------------------------------------
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If there are multiple instances of the `credential.helper` configuration
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variable, each helper will be tried in turn, and may provide a username,
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password, or nothing. Once Git has acquired both a username and a
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password, no more helpers will be tried.
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If `credential.helper` is configured to the empty string, this resets
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the helper list to empty (so you may override a helper set by a
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lower-priority config file by configuring the empty-string helper,
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followed by whatever set of helpers you would like).
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CREDENTIAL CONTEXTS
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-------------------
@@ -162,6 +152,16 @@ helper::
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shell (so, for example, setting this to `foo --option=bar` will execute
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`git credential-foo --option=bar` via the shell. See the manual of
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specific helpers for examples of their use.
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If there are multiple instances of the `credential.helper` configuration
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variable, each helper will be tried in turn, and may provide a username,
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password, or nothing. Once Git has acquired both a username and a
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password, no more helpers will be tried.
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+
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If `credential.helper` is configured to the empty string, this resets
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the helper list to empty (so you may override a helper set by a
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lower-priority config file by configuring the empty-string helper,
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followed by whatever set of helpers you would like).
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username::
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