Git Version Control Cookbook - Second Edition

How it works...

Authentication needs to solve the question, Who is the person trying to access the service?. There are many ways to do it: login and password, tokens, and so on. OAuth is another way to answer that question. OAuth stands for Open Authentication and it is an open standard for access delegation. It allows users to have access to websites (such as our Jenkins instance) without having to provide them, and therefore trust them, with a password.

GitHub has the ability to act as an OAuth provider, which means that other websites can be configured to accept the credentials provided by GitHub to let users access their services.

This means that whenever a user tries to access a Jenkins instance configured to accept GitHub OAuth, he ...