Git http auth broken in devcontainers

Support Bug Reports
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

Since today, git fetch does not work anymore for me in a devcontainer. It asks me for username and password, but we use git-credential-oauth (on the host OS) which seems to be broken after the latest update of the Dev Containers extension?

This bug existed on Docker Desktop v4.50.0 and also after upgrading to v4.52.0.

I have anysphere.remote-containers version 1.0.28 installed

Bug does not happen in VSCode - there it just works.

Steps to Reproduce

run git fetch in the terminal

Expected Behavior

empty output, fetch latest changes

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 2.1.34
Commit: 609c37304ae83141fd217c4ae638bf5321856500
Date: 2025-11-25T16:35:52.391Z
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Cursor/2.1.34 Chrome/138.0.7204.251 Electron/37.7.0 Safari/537.36

Does this stop you from using Cursor

Yes - Cursor is unusable

4

Tagging @ravirahman because he posted in multiple threads about v1.0.28. Can you please confirm you saw this thread?

6

Here is the analysis by Opus 4.5:

How It Works

  1. Host-side credential helper: On your host machine, you have git-credential-oauth configured which handles GitLab OAuth authentication.

  2. IPC Socket: The Dev Containers extension creates a Unix socket in /tmp/ (e.g., vscode-remote-containers-ipc-*.sock) inside the container.

  3. Credential forwarding server: The extension runs a server that listens on this socket and forwards credential requests from the container to the host machine’s credential helper.

  4. Environment variable: The extension sets REMOTE_CONTAINERS_IPC=/tmp/vscode-remote-containers-ipc-*.sock in all spawned shells/terminals.

  5. Git config injection: The extension injects a credential helper into /etc/gitconfig and ~/.gitconfig that uses a Node.js script to communicate with the IPC socket.

What’s Broken in Cursor (Anysphere Dev Containers)

I found two issues:

  1. REMOTE_CONTAINERS_IPC environment variable is empty - Your terminal doesn’t have this variable set, so the credential helper script doesn’t know where to connect.

  2. The IPC server isn’t running - The socket file /tmp/vscode-remote-containers-ipc-ece9b407-c606-45fd-95eb-5ef2c76c8d8a.sock exists (created Nov 25), but no process is listening on it. The connection is refused.

This means the Anysphere dev containers extension is:

  • Creating the socket file initially

  • Injecting the git credential helper config

  • But not maintaining the IPC server that should handle credential requests

  • And not setting the environment variable in new terminals

How to fix

The Dev Containers extension needs to properly maintain the credential forwarding IPC server and set the REMOTE_CONTAINERS_IPC environment variable.

8

I am going to cancel my subscription before December 23 if this is not fixed. Cursor is useless for me as is.

11

Hey @sb123 so sorry it took us so long to respond to you.

I am looking into the issue and so far i am unable to reproduce the bug.

Can u share a bit more about the error that you are seeing when you run git fetch
also if you can some logs would be great.

  1. container’s config : you can get this by going to remote explorer extension > right click on the container > show details. or directly through docker > container > inspect.
  2. The logs when you run GIT_TRACE=2 git fetch
  3. The config from /.gitconfig
13

Hey @sb123 we had few others complain about this issue and what worked there was -

  1. Install the GitHub Pull Request extension if not present already.
  2. Sign out first by going to command palette (cmd / ctrl + shift + p) and selecting Sign out option.
  3. Then open the palette again and select Sign in with Github and sign in.

Try reopening the container (do rebuild server and reload container) and running git commands. It should work now.

Also make sure the dev container extension is up-to-date.

Lmk if u are still facing issues!

16

Hi, thanks for the reply. I am using a self-hosted Gitlab instance that only has HTTPS access. Thus using git-credential-oauth. I don’t think GitHub Pull Request extension will work there.

Will try to send you some logs in the coming days once I find time.

18

Can you try to sing in with gitlab workflow extension.

If that doesn’t work, can u edit the remote url in the repo config to use PAT instead and try again. Here’s what I found - remote: Repository not found (only on VSCode) · Issue #3109 · microsoft/vscode-pull-request-github · GitHub