How to Clone from GitHub with a Fine-grained PAT

date: ; langs: en, cs

Fine-grained tokens sound like a good thing. And they are a good thing. You get a token that can access just one private repository, can only do a few specific actions, and rots away after a certain time. Neat, right?

But. The feature has been in beta for almost two years and the best documentation for the task in the title is on stackoverflow. Sad. Making a token to clone a repo really isn’t a single button click. It’s actually, I’d say, pretty unfriendly. But oh well, it can be done somehow, I just need to document it here a bit.

So how? To generate a token, go here and from the giant pile of permissions click the following:

  • Commit statuses - Access: Read and Write
  • Contents - Access: Read and Write
  • Pull requests - Access: Read and Write
  • Metadata - Access: Read

Then copy the token and simply:

git clone https://githubtoken@github.com/user/repo.git

Just the token, no user. Not even the oauth2 user mentioned on stackoverflow above.

And that’s it.