netrcli - cli for .netrc file

netrcli is a small command line tool to work with entries in .netrc file. As the .netrc file support is implemented in many tools, like ftp, curl, pip, and wget, this tool targets to help the use of those tools with authenticated services, like GitLab.

The credentials are stored in plaintext in the .netrc file.

This is the way .netrc is. You have been warned.

In the background netrcli extends python standard library netrc implementation.

Installation

Install the command line tool from with pipx:

pipx install netrcli

Alternatively use pip for the installation:

pip install netrcli

Either way, to check the installation and netrcli version, run:

netrcli --version

If you see a version in the terminal, you're good to go!

Usage

When in doubt, try

netrcli --help

The tool uses ~/.netrc file. If such does not exist, it will be created to the home directory of the current user.

Updating entries in .netrc file

To add or modify the entry of myhost.com in the .netrc file, run

netrcli update --login user@name.com --password qwerty123 myhost.com

Use in GitLab pipelines

To add GitLab credentials in the .netrc file during GitLab jobs, run

netrcli update --gitlab-ci

in the GitLab job. This adds an entry in the .netrc file with using environment variables CI_SERVER_HOST CI_REGISTRY_USER, and CI_JOB_TOKEN. Now you can use for example curl to fetch packages from GitLab package registry with just --netrc argument set.

Note, that curl only supports HTTP basic authentication with the credentials from .netrc file with ``--netrc` argument.

Most of the endpoints in GitLab do not support HTTP basic authentication for authentication, but for example generic package registry does support it.

Get information from .netrc file

To get a stored login (username) to the standard output for a specific host from the .netrc file, run

netrcli get --login myhost.com

To get the stored password of the host, run:

netrcli get --password myhost.com

And to get the stored password of the host formatted in OAuth 2.0 authorization header, run

netrcli get --oauth-bearer myhost.com

This may be handy for example with curl --header "$(netrcli get --oauth-bearer myhost.com)" myhost.com/something.