7.1 Network Protocols

Git communicates with remote repositories over a network. That network can be your internal LAN, a VPN, or the Internet. Git provides three protocols for communicating with remote repositories:

  • SSH

  • git

  • HTTP/HTTPS

SSH

Accessing a repository over Secure Shell (SSH) is similar to accessing a repository directly from the file system with one exception. Before the path to the repository, you add the domain name, and username if needed, for the remote repository.

The only difference between the SSH URL (shown below) and the basic file system URL is the addition of git@github.com. That tells Git to attempt to log on to the github.com server via SSH with the username git and then clone the repository located at the

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