Migrating to Access Tokens for a Git repository and registry using Gitlab

10 Oct, 2022

We have a specific deployment that needs to be able to pull the source code from a repository.

To do this, the first developer created a user and that "user" was being used. As GitLab increased their pricing, there's no reason to have a build user there. So it's time to migrate from the fake user to an access token.

Git repository

I went to the project that the system needed to pull the code for, and added an access token. project settings->access tokens and I selected read_repository and read_registry scopes. The system needs to pull the latest code to get the latest script to run the images and needs to pull the images as well.

I removed the user and no using git returns this error:

$ git fetch
... 
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

To modify it to use the new access token in the repo

$ cd <path to repo>
$ cd .git
$ vi config

and update the url of the remote origin:

[remote "origin"]
        url = https://oauth2:<access_token>@gitlab.com/<GroupName>/<projectName>.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

Now it will work to fetch the git repo:

$ git fetch
remote: Enumerating objects: 528, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (468/468), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (441/441), done.
remote: Total 528 (delta 267), reused 24 (delta 24), pack-reused 60
Receiving objects: 100% (528/528), 322.46 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (292/292), completed with 8 local objects.

Docker registry

This one was fairly simple:

$ docker login registry.gitlab.com -u gitlab-ci-token -p <access_token>
Succeeded

They don't do a good job at documenting that the username is gitlab-ci-token