Based on Michael Scharf's comment ^[1]:

You can leave out the password, so that it won't be logged in your Bash history file:

git clone https://username@github.com/username/repository.git

It will prompt you for your password.

Alternatively, you may use:

git clone https://username:password@github.com/username/repository.git

This way worked for me from a GitHub repository.

The user@host:path/to/repo format tells Git to use ssh to log in to host with username user. From git help clone ^[1]:

An alternative scp-like syntax may also be used with the ssh protocol:

[user@]host.xz:path/to/repo.git/

The part before the @ is the username, and the authentication method (password, public key, etc.) is determined by ssh, not Git. Git has no way to pass a password to ssh, because ssh might not even use a password depending on the configuration of the remote server.

Use ssh-agent to avoid typing passwords all the time

If you don't want to type your ssh password all the time, the typical solution is to generate a public/private key pair ^[2], put the public key in your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file ^[3] on the remote server, and load your private key into ssh-agent ^[4]. Also see Configuring Git over SSH to login once ^[5], GitHub's help page on ssh key passphrases ^[6], gitolite's ssh documentation ^[7], and Heroku's ssh keys documentation ^[8].

Choosing between multiple accounts at GitHub (or Heroku or...)

If you have multiple accounts at a place like GitHub or Heroku, you'll have multiple ssh keys (at least one per account). To pick which account you want to log in as, you have to tell ssh which private key to use ^[9].

For example, suppose you had two GitHub accounts: foo and bar. Your ssh key for foo is ~/.ssh/foo_github_id and your ssh key for bar is ~/.ssh/bar_github_id. You want to access git@github.com:foo/foo.git with your foo account and git@github.com:bar/bar.git with your bar account. You would add the following to your ~/.ssh/config:

Host gh-foo
    Hostname github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo_github_id
Host gh-bar
    Hostname github.com
    User git
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/bar_github_id

You would then clone the two repositories as follows:

git clone gh-foo:foo/foo.git  # logs in with account foo
git clone gh-bar:bar/bar.git  # logs in with account bar

Avoiding ssh altogether

Some services provide HTTP access as an alternative to ssh:

• GitHub:

  https://username:password@github.com/username/repository.git
  

• Gitorious ^[10]:

  https://username:password@gitorious.org/project/repository.git
  

• Heroku: See this support article ^[11].

warning: Adding your password to the clone URL will cause Git to store your plaintext password in .git/config. To securely store your password when using HTTP, use a credential helper. For example:

git config --global credential.helper cache
git config --global credential.https://github.com.username foo
git clone https://github.com/foo/repository.git

The above will cause Git to ask for your password once every 15 minutes (by default). See git help credentials ^[12] for details.

Follow these arguments to replace with your special cases if they are creating an issue:

 !   #   $   &   '   (   )   *   +   ,   /   :   ;   =   ?   @   [   ]

%21 %23 %24 %26 %27 %28 %29 %2A %2B %2C %2F %3A %3B %3D %3F %40 %5B %5D

So for example:

Actual URL: https://usern@me:p@ssword@git/reponame.git

Solution URL to use: https://usern%40me:p%40ssword@git/reponame.git

In the comments of Bassetassen's answer ^[1], plosco mentioned ^[2] that you can use git clone https://<token>@github.com/username/repository.git to clone from GitHub at the very least. I thought I would expand on how to do that, in case anyone comes across this answer like I did while trying to automate some cloning.

GitHub has a very handy ^[3] guide on how to do this, but it doesn't cover what to do if you want to include it all in one line for automation purposes. It warns that adding the token to the clone URL will store it in plaintext in .git/config. This is obviously a security risk for almost every use case, but since I plan on deleting the repository and revoking the token when I'm done, I don't care.

1. Create a Token

GitHub has a whole guide here ^[4] on how to get a token, but here's the TL;DR.

1. Go to Settings > Developer Settings > Personal Access Tokens ( here's a direct link ^[5])
2. Click "Generate a New Token" and enter your password again. (h ere's another direct link ^[6])
3. Set a description/name for it, check the "repo" permission and hit the "Generate token" button at the bottom of the page.
4. Copy your new token before you leave the page

2. Clone the repository

The same as the command plosco gave ^[7], git clone https://<token>@github.com/<username>/<repository>.git, just replace <token>, <username> and <repository> with whatever your information is.

If you want to clone it to a specific folder, just insert the folder address at the end like so: git clone https://<token>@github.com/<username>/<repository.git> <folder>, where <folder> is, you guessed it, the folder to clone it to! You can of course use ., .., ~, etc. here like you can elsewhere.

3. Leave No Trace

Not all of this may be necessary, depending on how sensitive what you're doing is.

• You probably don't want to leave that token hanging around if you have no intentions of using it for some time, so go back to the tokens page ^[8] and hit the delete button next to it.
• If you don't need the repository again, delete it rm -rf <folder>.
• If do need the repository again, but don't need to automate it again, you can remove the remote by doing git remote remove origin or just remove the token by running git remote set-url origin https://github.com/<username>/<repository.git>.
• Clear your bash history to make sure the token doesn't stay logged there. There are many ways to do this, see this question ^[9] and this question ^[10]. However, it may be easier to just prepend all the above commands with a space in order to prevent them being stored to begin with.

Note that I'm not a professional, so the above may not be secure in the sense that no trace would be left for any sort of forensic work.

A 13 Aug 2021 post you must use

• Git Clone

  https://username:token@github.com/username/repository.git

To generate a token:

Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Generate new token*

• Git Push

After successful cloning, the next time when you do git push, you won't have to mention the username again. You can confirm this by opening the .git/config file in Notepad ^[1]. It will show:

[remote "origin"]
    url = https://username:tokenxxxxxxxxxx@github.com/username/repo.git

Though there are many answers, I faced the repeated issue when username or password had special characters in them.

URL encode ^[1] your username and password for Git, and then use it as part of URL itself (when there isn't any security concern).

Say, the URL encoded value of the username:

'user+1' is user%2B1

And the URL encoded value of the password:

'Welcome@1234' is Welcome%401234

Then your Git clone URL would look like,

git clone https://user%2B1:Welcome%401234@actual-git-url-for-the-repo works perfectly, whereas,

git clone https://user+1:Welcome@1234@actual-git-url-for-the-repo gives you 403 errors.

Just in case, if you want to URL encode online: URL Encode and Decode - Online ^[2]

To clone a repository, first you should generate an access token (you can't use your login password anymore) and then clone the repository with this generated token.

Generate access token:

GitHub:
Settings → Developer settings → Personal access tokens → Generate new token

Bitbucket ^[1]:
Settings → Personal Bitbucket settings → App passwords → Create app password

Clone the repository:

GitHub:

git clone https://YOUR-USERNAME:GENERATED-TOKEN@github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/YOUR-REPOSITORY

Bitbucket:

git clone https://YOUR-USERNAME@bitbucket.org/YOUR-REPOSITORY

It will prompt you for the generated token.

I solved this problem in the following way:

On Windows, the following steps should retrigger the GitHub login window when git cloneing:

• Search start menu for " Credential Manager ^[1]"
• Select "Windows Credentials"
• Delete any credentials related to Git or GitHub

If you're using http/https and you're looking to FULLY AUTOMATE the process without requiring any user input or any user prompt at all (for example: inside a CI/CD pipeline), you may use the following approach leveraging git credential.helper

GIT_CREDS_PATH="/my/random/path/to/a/git/creds/file"
# Or you may choose to not specify GIT_CREDS_PATH at all.
# See https://git-scm.com/docs/git-credential-store#FILES for the defaults used

git config --global credential.helper "store --file ${GIT_CREDS_PATH}"
echo "https://alice:${ALICE_GITHUB_PASSWORD}@github.com" > ${GIT_CREDS_PATH}

where you may choose to set the ALICE_GITHUB_PASSWORD environment variable from a previous shell command or from your pipeline config etc.

Remember that "store" based git-credential-helper stores passwords & values in plain-text. So make sure your token/password has very limited permissions.

Now simply use https://alice@github.com/my_repo.git wherever your automated system needs to fetch the repo - it will use the credentials for alice in github.com as store by git-credential-helper.

I prefer to use GIT_ASKPASS ^[1] environment for providing HTTPS credentials to Git.
Provided that login and password are exported in USR and PSW variables, the following script does not leave traces of password in history and disk, plus it is not vulnerable to special characters in the password:

GIT_ASKPASS=$(mktemp) && chmod a+rx $GIT_ASKPASS && export GIT_ASKPASS

cat > $GIT_ASKPASS <<'EOF'
#!/bin/sh
exec echo "$PSW"
EOF

git clone https://${USR}@example.com/repo.git

NB: Note the single quotes around the heredoc ^[2] marker 'EOF' which means that temporary script holds literally $PSW characters, not the password / expanded value of PSW variable

Use:

git config --global core.askpass

Run this first before cloning the same way, and it should be fixed!

The organization that I work for uses Atlassian's Bitbucket ^[1] product (not GitHub), essentially their version of GitHub so that repositories can be secured completely on premise. I was running into a similar problem as @coordinate, in that my password was required for a new repository I checked out. My credentials had been saved globally for all Bitbucket projects, so I'm not sure what prompted the loss of credentials.

In short, I was able to enter the following Git command (supplying only my username), which then prompted Git's Credential Manager to prompt me for the password, which I was then able to save.

git clone https://user@code.domain.org/git/[organization]/[team]/[repository.git]

Note: the bracketed directory sub-paths simply refer to internal references, and will vary for you!

HTTPS Git URLs

git clone https://user:password@host

Including the password in the Git URL is considered bad practice ^[1] because it risks inadvertent credentials exposure in config files and command history. It also breaks if the password changes.

More secure and more reliable is to use a credential-generating helper such as Git Credential Manager ^[2] (included in Git for Windows) or git-credential-oauth ^[3] (included in several Linux distributions).

The first time you authenticate, the helper opens a browser window to the host. Subsequent authentication within storage lifetime is non interactive.

SSH Git URLs

SSH authentication requires an SSH key. This file is thousands of bytes; you can't include it in the URL. You can include the username in the URL:

git clone ssh://user@host

If the SSH key is protected by a passphrase, you can use ssh-agent to remember it ^[4].

Git Custom Helper Script at Clone Time:

Using Only Environment Variables

tl;dr

One-liner

git -c credential.username=${CI_GIT_USER} -c credential.helper='!f() { test \"$1\" = get && echo "password=${CI_GIT_PASSWORD}"; }; f' clone --branch $CI_GIT_BRANCH $CI_GIT_URL $CI_GIT_ROOT

Multi-liner

git -c credential.username=${CI_GIT_USER} \
    -c credential.helper='!f() { test \"$1\" = get && echo "password=${CI_GIT_PASSWORD}"; }; f' \
    clone --branch $CI_GIT_BRANCH $CI_GIT_URL $CI_GIT_ROOT

Custom git credential.helper scripts

From the git credentials docs:

https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials#_custom_helpers

# or you can specify your own shell snippet
[credential "https://example.com"]
    username = your_user
    helper = "!f() { test \"$1\" = get && echo \"password=$(cat $HOME/.secret)\"; }; f"

Not great since it is loading from a file but this could interpolate an environment variable.

Git Config at Clone Time

A little known fact is specifying git config when the git repo is not even created yet eg, cloning. You can specify git -c key=value clone <git_url_here>

I know this because I have had to get git to accept self-signed certificate authorities ^[1] at clone time for server and client challenges.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git#Documentation/git.txt--cltnamegtltvaluegt

Why does the custom script work?

A git credential.helper needs to responds to either get, store or erase commands and reads from the stdout stream.

!f() { test \"$1\" = get && echo \"password=${CI_GIT_PASSWORD}\"; }; f

• test \"$1\" = get this checks if the command was get
• && control operator will only run the next command if the prior command had an exit status that is Truthy (which weirdly has to be zero because that means EXIT_SUCCESS), a non-zero exit code is Falsey (Usually some failure code).
• echo \"password=${CI_GIT_PASSWORD}\"; the stdout stream has a key=value response.
• !f() { ... }; f This whole outside wrapper defines the command and runs it.

https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials#Documentation/gitcredentials.txt-codegetcode

Resources

• https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials#_custom_helpers
• https://git-scm.com/docs/git#Documentation/git.txt--cltnamegtltvaluegt
• https://git-scm.com/docs/gitcredentials#Documentation/gitcredentials.txt-codegetcode
• How can I make git accept a self signed certificate? ^[2]

In case you have the credentials stored in any kind of credential-helper, but not configured the credential helper to be active globally, you can clone like this:

git clone https://git.example.com/ns/repo.git --config=credential.helper=store

This sets the credential-helper configuration locally (for the new repository only) before cloning.

You need only no verify ssl:

git -c http.sslVerify=false clone https://github.com/organization/repo.git

Clone have been made simple to receive on in your local directory using terminal windows via Personal Access Tokens. More over one can define the access permissions related to token in your GitHub settings.

Here is an example using Personal Token to receive the clone of a repo that is private:

git clone -b main https://[GITHUB_PERSONAL_TOKEN]@github.com/[GITHUB_ORG OR GITHUB_USERNAME]/[GITHUB_REPO].git

Most of the time this works well.

git clone https://username:password@github.com/username/repository.git

However, there is another scenario when someone invites you to their organization's repository. And let’s say this is how the repository URL will look like.

https://github.com/organization/repo.git

Now in this scenario, the following URL

https://username:password@github.com/username/repository.git

will not work. You need to make some modifications to it in the following way.

https://username:password@github.com/organization/repository.git