Tips and Tricks

Please add your tips and tricks here, or if you are unsure whether they are a good fit, first create a show & tell discussion.

Also see the list of show & tell discussions.

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Host petnames

You might want to use gh: instead of having to type github.com/ over and over again.

There are at least two methods to achieve that when using Git and Magit. Make sure to not combine the two approaches for the same host.

Regardless of what approach you chose, test with something like:

$ git clone gh:magit/forge

If that works, it should also work in Magit; without any Magit specific configuration.

(Before v0.4, Magit needed some extra configuration for the second approach to work. If any entries remain in forge-alist, which reference an alias, then please remove that.)

SSH identities

To refer to github.com as gh add to ~/.ssh/config:

Host gh
     HostName github.com
     User git

See ssh_config(5)#Hostname.

Git URL rewriting

To refer to github.com as gh add to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config or ~/.gitconfig:

[url "[email protected]:"]
	insteadOf = gh:

See git-clone(1) and git-config(1)#FILES.

Accessing unsecured hosts

Initially only secured forges (those using tls) were supported (because I assumed that nobody would forgo securing their gitlab and github instances).

The consequence is that in addition to the usual setup, you additionally have to add the APIHOST and WEBHOST of the respective forge-alist entry to ghub-insecure-hosts as well.

For example, for this forge-alist entry

("example.com" "example.com/api/v4" "www.example.com" forge-gitlab-repository)

you have to add

(add-to-list 'ghub-insecure-hosts "example.com/api/v4")
(add-to-list 'ghub-insecure-hosts "www.example.com")

Accessing private forge through zero trust proxy

To access a private forge through a zero-trust proxy, an additional access token must be attached to requests. Assuming get-zero-trust-token is a function that returns the appropriate token as a string, we can advise ghub--headers to inject the access token:

(advice-add 'ghub--headers :around
            (lambda (fn headers host auth username forge)
              (funcall fn
                       (if-let* ((_(string-match-p "zero-trust\\.forge" host))
                                 (token (get-zero-trust-token host)))
                           `(("access-token" . ,token) ,@headers)
                         headers)
                       host auth username forge)))

How to use Gnome Passwords / Keyring

Add this to your init to instruct emacs to use the secrets api (aka gnome passwords/keyring):

(setq auth-sources '("secrets:Login"))

Also see Secret Service API.

You need to eval this after you set the auth source as above, to create a secret in the gnome keyring with the fields you want since you cannot do this from the UI:

(secrets-create-item "login" "Forge Github Token"
                     "YOUR_GITHUB_TOKEN_GOES_HERE"
                     :host "api.github.com"
                     :user "YOUR_USERNAME_GOES_HERE^forge")

_{Taken from #462.}