Cloning a private Git repository with LibGit2Sharp and Git Credential Manager for Windows

My current client is using a micro services architecture. As such they have a lot of Git repositories.

We needed a script to clone them all, switch to a branch, and produce a report of which services are used by other services.

In order to do this we've written some LinqPad scripts using LibGit2Sharp. We soon hit a problem as our Git server requires authentication and obviously we didn’t want to hard code user credentials into a script.

We're using the latest version Git, so we already have Microsoft's Git Credential Manager for Windows installed. It's securely storing our Git credentials, but how do we access them from C# code?

The solution

It turns out it's easy to do, but not very well documented.

Microsoft recently published the Git Credential Manager client on NuGet. You can grab it here:

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.Alm.Authentication

You'll also need LibGit2Sharp:

PM> Install-Package Install-Package LibGit2Sharp -Pre

Note:

There seems to be an issue with the latest version of LibGit2Sharp (0.22.0 at time of writing) and LinqPad / Visual Studio.
I found 0.21.0.176 works with LinqPad and the latest 0.23.0 pre release works in Visual Studio.

Once you have those packages installed, this C# code snippet is all you need:

var secrets = new SecretStore("git");
var auth = new BasicAuthentication(secrets);
var creds = auth.GetCredentials(new TargetUri("https://github.com"));

var options = new CloneOptions
{
	CredentialsProvider = (_url, _user, _cred) => new UsernamePasswordCredentials
	{
		Username = creds.Username,
		Password = creds.Password
	},
};

Repository.Clone("https://github.com/kevinkuszyk/private-repro.git", @"c:\projects", options);

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The solution