This may be a little niche, or too specific to my situation, but I'm having some troubles and figured I'd ask if anyone here had experience or insight on how to resolve them. No worries if this is too specific. I don't expect anyone here to go through the trouble of setting up
GitLab and
SourceTree just to help me out, though I wouldn't put it past some of you people to be that awesomely helpful.
A Brief-ish History:Ten years ago
a thread started here on some relatively new distributed version control systems called Git and Mercurial (Hg). At the time when I researched them, I wanted to use Git but it wasn't easy to get working on Windows, so I ended up using Hg. So for about the past ten years I've become an old fart, set in my ways, thumbing my nose at Git while more or less happily using Hg with BitBucket and TortoiseHg. That is, until
last year when BitBucket dropped support for Hg repositories.
For a little while I remained stubborn and hosted my own RhodeCode server but it wasn't ideal because I actually collaborate with at least one other person on a somewhat regular basis and my ISP's upload speed isn't that great and
my internet connection kept dropping out frequently, so it wasn't very reliable for others to connect to and use.
As a result, this past December I decided to bite the bullet and convert all my repositories to Git and start using Git from then on. And after doing some research I decided I'd rather be using GitLab than GitHub. So I first used a feature of GitHub to import my Mercurial repositories from my personal RhodeCode server and convert them to Git automatically. Then I used a feature of GitLab to import my GitHub repositories to GitLab.
While I was still using Hg, I was alternating between using TortoiseHg and SourceTree to manage my repositories. That is, I primarily used TortoiseHg, but I felt SourceTree had better integrated using development branches more easily. When I made the move to Git, I obviously had to drop TortoiseHg, but I decided to just keep using SourceTree, which supports both Git and Hg (for now... Atlassian owns BitBucket and SourceTree).
I think I got it all configured and had it working in December so that I could connect with GitLab and push/pull to/from my repositories. But then this year I've kind of taken a break from my usual thing and have just been doing little experiments that I never felt were big or important enough for version control. But now I'm starting to get back into wanting version control and I've run into a problem where I can't seem to get SourceTree to work with GitLab anymore.
The Problem:Somehow I was able to successfully create a new remote repository from SourceTree, but then I immediately got an error when it tried to push my local repo to it. The error looks something like this:
remote: HTTP Basic: Access denied
remote: You must use a personal access token with 'read_repository' or 'write_repository' scope for Git over HTTP.
remote: You can generate one at https://gitlab.com/-/profile/personal_access_tokens
fatal: Authentication failed for 'https://gitlab.com/Deozaan/MyCoolRepository.git/'
GitLab has something called "personal access tokens" (PAT) which can be used in place of your password to authenticate third-party apps to work with your account. The UI doesn't make it very clear (IMO) which scopes are needed, and which scopes include the privileges of other scopes, etc. So, while the PAT I created from December had only the "api" scope, the error message says I need "read_repository" and/or "write_repository" so I created a new PAT with all the scopes.
It didn't help. I still get the same error.
I tried changing the URL to use SSH instead of HTTPS, but then it just asks me to load a ppk file which supposedly contains my SSH key. I don't have one of those. Or at least not the right one. I found one on my PC which I thought might be the right one, but when I load it, it just asks me for the SSH password over and over again. So it seems that the password I have stored in my password manager for GitLab SSH key does not match whatever SSH key is in that ppk file.
I do have my SSH private key stored in my password manager, but the putty agent (pageant) which SourceTree uses seems to require PPK format instead of... whatever format I have it stored as. It starts with "-----BEGIN OPENSSH PRIVATE KEY-----" whereas the random PPK file I found where I thought my GitLab SSH key would be starts with "PuTTY-User-Key-File-2: ssh-rsa"
So here I am with two PATs that don't seem to work anymore. Somehow I have saved an incompatible SSH key/password in my password manager. I swear I had this all working fine in December and I don't know what changed in the interim.
And I don't know if it's a classic case of PEBCAK, or if GitLab's PATs aren't working right, or if SourceTree is not working properly. I just want to be able to push to and pull from my GitLab repos from SourceTree!
That said, I'm mostly just sticking with SourceTree because I'm already familiar with it and because it's free. If there's an alternative (and free) Git GUI client that works well with GitLab and runs on Windows which would solve my problem, I'd be happy to hear your recommendations on that front, as well.
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But I do have a little bit of feedback on the aesthetics.