GIT clone over HTTP: who knew?

Quick note for others and so I don’t forget.

If you’re behind a proxy (like I am) and try to do a git-clone using the git:// protocol, surely it will fail if you’re firewall is restrictive. The beautiful thing is, you can use http:// protocol instead to get around this restriction.

So for instance, let’s say we want to clone a copy of yubnub from github. In the cygwin command line, you would normally do:

git clone git://github.com/jcnetdev/yubnub.git

However that will fail. Instead do:

git clone http://github.com/jcnetdev/yubnub.git

The only other gotcha is that you might need to setup your proxy in your environment. To do this, simply do:

export http_proxy=http://<username>:<password>@<proxy_ip>:<proxy_port>

where:

username = your network username (someuser)
password = your network password (somepassword)
proxy_ip = the ip address of your proxy server (192.168.1.1)
proxy_port = the port number for the proxy (80)

the full string would look like this:

export http_proxy=http://someuser:somepassword@192.168.1.1:80