Quite often many of us are working on Git in our offices and are behind our corporate firewall which messes with our ability to fetch public and privately shared Git repositories.
I’ve run in this scenario this week and it is incredibly frustrating. For some reason, whenever I was
doing a bower install inside a local Git repository I was getting the following intermittent error:
fatal: unable to connect to github.xxx.com:
github.xxx.com[0: XXX.XX.XXX.XXX]: errno=Operation timed outThis issue was sporadic and hence very hard to tie down by myself or internal IT. Anyway, surely life cannot always suck and there are workarounds?
Turns out when in doubt with Git, cloning via https is usually your best bet because it will very rarely
if ever be blocked by your corporate firewall.
Not wanting to change my project’s bower.json which is using git://, the following command line allowed
me to change the protocol to https:// on the fly either globally or against a local repository.
# Global
$ git config --global url."https://".insteadOf git://
# Non-Global (for current repository only)
$ git config url."https://".insteadOf git://