How to update your Git credentials on Windows

Git is awesome and I love it. Plain and simple. It works. Yet, there are occasions when things within Git break. And then you have to go googlebing for the solution.

I'm just back from a 2-week holiday and, as expected, my Windows credentials had expired so I changed them. Then I tried to do a git pull and I got this nice error message:

$ git pull
fatal: Authentication failed for `repo url/`

Apparently, updating my domain credentials also broke my Git credentials. At first, I thought there was an issue with my credential.helper. So I unset it and set it again. No joy. Then my good friend David Rankin (@rankida) came to the rescue. (We started work on the same day, so his account creds expired while I was off).

To update your credentials, go to Control Panel -> Credential Manager -> Generic Credentials. Find the credentials related to your git account and edit them to use the updated passwords as per the image below:

I hope this helps with your Git issues. Special thanks to David who had to do the 'hard work'.

P.S Follow me on Twitter @christosmatskas for more up-to-date news, articles and tips.


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