desktop: Authentication Failed (with valid credentials, CLI is working fine)

I’ve chatted with GH Support. The problem in my case seems to be that with 2FA activated my GH password won’t work in either in the login panel or in the CLI … a personal access token has to be created and used …

https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-personal-access-token-for-the-command-line/

Further, the CLI won’t remember the token session-to-session, so I need to follow the instructions to cache a token (which I haven’t done yet, but will to later today) …

https://help.github.com/articles/caching-your-github-password-in-git/

NOTE TO OWNERS Someone really dropped the ball here on surfacing migration info during the GH Desktop installation process. IIRC, I didn’t need to go thru these steps with the prior GH Desktop, perhaps because I activated 2FA at some point later. However, these probs should’ve been foreseen, and you should’ve taken steps to surface these migration details during the install process using screens that the installer shows. Throwing auth error messages at the user when they’re providing correct login credentials is a horrible user experience. It’s a waste of my time and the time of the GH Support cats.

Just wanted to add … same here. I was using the old GH Desktop for several years without problem. It seems to have reached a point where it forced me to upgrade.

Current behavior is that GH Desktop (the app) authenticates and works as expected. The CLI tho doesn’t … It asks me for credentials in a pop-up panel first … and then flips over to the command line asking for credentials. It won’t authenticate. For something like a force push, I can’t use the UI, so I’m pretty much broken at the moment.

I’ve put in a support request with GH to see if they can help.

Thanks for opening this @manoadamro.

Usually I solve this by deleting all of my ssh keys, both locally and on github, regenerating and re-adding them, this is a annoying but necessary. If there was a more ‘proper’ way of solving this, i would really like to hear it.

Are you using SSH with all of your repositories in GitHub Desktop? GitHub Desktop defaults to HTTPS, so any repositories that you cloned in-app should be using HTTPS remotes (hence why you are seeing the credential error popup).

Log in box pops up and refuses to accept any credentials i give it

Can you try going into Keychain Access.app and deleting the GitHub - https://api.github.com entry located there? Then try logging in again to GitHub Desktop. That should hopefully fix this issue.

I’ve chatted with GH Support. The problem in my case seems to be that with 2FA activated my GH password won’t work in either in the login panel or in the CLI … a personal access token has to be created and used …

https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-personal-access-token-for-the-command-line/

Further, the CLI won’t remember the token session-to-session, so I need to follow the instructions to cache a token (which I haven’t done yet, but will to later today) …

https://help.github.com/articles/caching-your-github-password-in-git/

NOTE TO OWNERS Someone really dropped the ball here on surfacing migration info during the GH Desktop installation process. IIRC, I didn’t need to go thru these steps with the prior GH Desktop, perhaps because I activated 2FA at some point later. However, these probs should’ve been foreseen, and you should’ve taken steps to surface these migration details during the install process using screens that the installer shows. Throwing auth error messages at the user when they’re providing correct login credentials is a horrible user experience. It’s a waste of my time and the time of the GH Support cats.

Thanks a lot @guardrex , this solved my issue.

wincred doesn’t support 2FA dialogs, which is why you have to fall back to using personal access tokens.

If you want to get back to using the Desktop credentials from the CLI, open this file %LOCALAPPDATA%\GitHub\PortableGit_69bd5e6f85e4842f07db71c9618a621154c52254\mingw32\etc\gitconfig, find this section and update it to look like this:

[credential]
	helper = !github --credentials

Then cleanup whatever you had set for credential.helper in your ~/.gitconfig and launch a fresh shell to see if it’s been fixed.

I’m having this same problem… *just started happening with the latest update (I’m now on “End of an Era (3.3.5.1) 1173c88” ) This has been working fine for me for years… this update broke something. Whenever I connect to the app or try to sync a repo it pops up the box and won’t accept any flavor of my authentication (username/password, email/password, username/key, email/key). If I go into the settings and “logout” then re-login it only accepts my username/password OR email/password but Not username/key or email/key *and then it asks and accepts my 2-factor authentication. This seems “successful” only in that it doesn’t show me an error and shows my account details so clearly it connected BUT when it returns me to the repo view and I try to do anything I still get the broken auth popup so I’m not really “logged in” successfully.

FYI at the command line I’m using Cygwin’s git and have my credentials successfully stored in the “store”. Is there any way to “downgrade” until this is fixed the app is completely useless to me… the last version worked just fine.