Secure Git and GitHub Authentication

The @purista/sandbox provider implements a security-first approach to handling Git credentials for AI agents and users.

How it Works

When you provide a gitConfig with a token, the following happens inside the sandbox:

1. GitHub CLI Authentication

We use the official GitHub CLI (gh) as the primary identity provider.

• Secure Piping: The token is piped directly into gh auth login --with-token via stdin. This ensures the token never appears in the container's process list or shell history.
• No Trace: The token is stored in the container's secure memory by the gh tool, not in cleartext environment variables.

2. Git Credential Helper

Instead of storing the token in .gitconfig (which is highly insecure), we configure Git to use the GitHub CLI as its credential helper:

git config --global credential.helper "!gh auth git-credential"

This means whenever Git needs to clone or push, it asks the gh tool for the current token. The token is never written to disk in a plain-text configuration file.

3. Commit Attribution

The driver automatically configures user.name and user.email globally within the running instance, ensuring all commits are correctly attributed to the user/agent without baking them into the shared Docker image.

Usage Example

const sandbox = await eventBridge.invoke({
  serviceName: 'Sandbox',
  serviceTarget: 'createSandbox',
  payload: {
    projectId: 'my-project',
    gitConfig: {
      username: 'agent-bot',
      email: 'bot@example.com',
      token: process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN // Securely passed from your vault
    }
  },
  tenantId: 'my-org',
  principalId: 'user-123'
})