Authentication required when git isn't present

[mkasberg]

Describe the bug

When git is not installed, Chezmoi prompts for authentication to clone a public GitHub repository. Authentication should not be required.

To reproduce

This one-liner will reproduce the bug in a new, minimal Ubuntu Docker container:

docker run --rm -it ubuntu:latest /bin/bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install curl && sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- -b "$HOME/bin" init --apply -S ~/dotfiles mkasberg'

This is initializing config on a new machine using a slightly modified version of the init command from the https://chezmoi.io homepage.

Note that this works fine (does not prompt for auth) when git is installed:

docker run --rm -it ubuntu:latest /bin/bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install curl git && sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- -b "$HOME/bin" init --apply -S ~/dotfiles mkasberg'

Feel free to try that exact command with my dotfiles (since they're public anyway), but I expect it's reproducible with any GitHub username.

Expected behavior

Auth should not be required to clone a public repository over https. (In particular, since this is a bootstrapping step on a new machine, we might not yet have ssh keys, password vaults, etc.)

Output of command with the --verbose flag

 docker run --rm -it ubuntu:latest /bin/bash -c 'apt-get update && apt-get install curl && sh -c "$(curl -fsLS git.io/chezmoi)" -- -b "$HOME/bin" init --verbose --apply -S ~/dotfiles mkasberg'
[...]
info found version 2.28.0 for latest/linux/amd64
info installed /root/bin/chezmoi
chezmoi: https://mkasberg@github.com/mkasberg/dotfiles.git: authentication required
Username? ?

Output of chezmoi doctor

N/A - chezmoi is not yet installed.

Additional context

I'm 90% sure this is a bug with Chezmoi - apologies if I'm misunderstanding something here and this is from some other component or is expected behavior.

[twpayne]

Thanks for the report and the perfect reproduction case!

This is definitely a bug in chezmoi, and comes as an unwanted side effect of #2562. tl;dr including the username in the guessed repo URL causes chezmoi to prompt for authentication.

When you run chezmoi init mkasberg, chezmoi guesses the repo URL as https://mkasberg@github.com/mkasberg/dotfiles.git, which triggers the authentication prompt when git is not installed.

On the same machine without git installed, running chezmoi init --guess-repo-url=false https://github.com/mkasberg/dotfiles.git disables the repo URL guessing and does not prompt for authentication.

[halostatue]

I wonder if it might not be worthwhile to have a --public-repo flag that can be used for this situation? That is, chezmoi init --public-repo mkasberg would guess the repo URL as https://github.com/mkasberg/dotfiles.git. It would be good for cases where one has a dotfile configuration that is read-only from clients but read-write from a primary system.