I have attempted a number of times to create a pull request from the comfort of Emacs and Magit, with no success yet. The main problem is that I use most of the time my company’s GitHub Enterprise instance, not the public service called github.com. The GitHub service is so ubiquitous that many people forget there are other installations, not seen on the public Internet, where big corporations and hip companies keep their precious, precious code.

This week I finally made progress in setting up the connection.

You need to customize the variable forge-alist to include your company’s GHE as a new “forge”. You need to add there a four-element tuple that describes how Magit Forge should talk to this new Github, and also how it should be identified to the user. It is easier to see how the fields are intended if you use a Customize buffer, but in the end, you need to do the equivalent of evaluating this expression:

(push '("ghe.company.net" "ghe.company.net/api/v3"
        "ghe.company.net" forge-github-repository)
        forge-alist)

where it is assumed that your company’s sysadmins have deployed the Github service under a DNS name like ghe.company.net. Of course, this will be different for each deployment, and it could be called veryprivategithub.anotherdomainweown.com. You need to figure out that bit.

Another thing that was tricky was that the next thing to do, on a repository that has been cloned from a remote with this name, is to do a forge-pull. This will try to contact the GHE instance and download data like open issues.

In order to connect to the forge, Magit Forge needs to know which credentials to use. There is a wizard, for the first forge-pull, where you just need to give your user and password (!) and it will create the right token for you using the GHE API (and hopefully, immediately forget your credentials!).

If you have trust issues, or are a hacker that needs to do everything by themselves, you can do the following instead:

1. Change the order of sources in the variable auth-sources and set ~/authinfo.gpg higher than ~/authinfo. This means that the encrypted file will be used in preference to a plaintext file in order to store the token that allows Magit to connect to GHE.

2. Open ~/.authinfo.gpg. You may need to enter your passphrase for that file. You may need to create that file in the first place. You may need to create a GPG private/public keypair in order to encrypt files at all. Please refer to the GPG documentation for that. Ah! On top of that, when you try to open ~/.authinfo.gpg, and you are using GUI Emacs version 26, you may need to (setq epa-pinentry-mode 'loopback), otherwise it will not prompt you to enter your passphrase and just throw a decryption error. Go and do all of that, I will be waiting here.

3. Ready? OK, now create a token on the Github Enterprise API for your user account.

4. You should write that token into ~/.authinfo.gpg in this format:

# -*- epa-file-encrypt-to: ("youruser@company.net") -*-
machine ghe.company.net/api/v3 login youruser^forge password <and the token that you just generated>