You may want to consult a local programmer who has experience with Unix System Services on z/OS and ssh; it doesn’t sound as if the problem is actually with git.

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

Hi,

I am trying to clone my public Git repository using Putty instead of Git Bash. I am doing this over ssh instead of Https(which is the requirement). The Linux machine which i am accessing through putty has IBM OS(Linux on z/os). I have created the rsa keys and added same on Github. While trying to clone my repository , i am getting error as
’ssh-rsa: /usr/lpp/Files/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 1: FSUM7351 not found
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.’ although the public key is present.

IBMUSER:/Z21S/usr/lpp/Files/.ssh: >ls
id_rsa id_rsa.pub

When i am trying to issue command ssh -T github.com, i am getting error as ssh could not resolve hostname github

Please suggest.

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

My systems programmers recently installed Rocket’s port of git for z/OS and I am taking it for a test drive before making it available to our developers.

Everything appears to be set up correctly. However, when trying to clone a starter repository, I receive the following error message:

fatal: bad config line 1 in file /home/ag110058/episnu99/.git/config

Interestingly, the file referred to in the error message doesn’t even exist; the .git directory is empty.

Has anyone using the port run into this particular situation?

Also, as a friendly aside, the URL (https://github.com/zorts/hello_world;) in the “Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git” section of the instructions includes the trailing ‘;’ which results in 404 at the GitHub website. Perhaps this can be fixed?

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

Hello Jerry, thanks for the quick response.

Unfortunately, the additional tracing did not reveal anything useful.

And git init also fails similarly. However, it does actually populate the target .git directory. It appears that the text-based files in the .git directory are all ASCII-encoded. Is this expected? Thanks.

MVS9 /home/ag110058 GIT_TRACE=1 GIT_TRACE_SETUP=1 git clone git@github.com:zorts/hello_world.git 10:32:12.165290 ./git.c:371 trace: built-in: git 'clone' 'git@github.com:zorts/hello_world.git' Cloning into 'hello_world'... fatal: bad config line 1 in file /home/ag110058/hello_world/.git/config MVS9 /home/ag110058 GIT_TRACE=1 GIT_TRACE_SETUP=1 git init
10:33:37.940532 ./git.c:371 trace: built-in: git ‘init’
fatal: bad config line 1 in file /home/ag110058/.git/config
MVS9 /home/ag110058 ls -la .git total 736 drwxr-xr-x 6 ASG SOCAL 4096 Apr 10 2019 . drwxr-xr-x 115 ASG SOCAL 348160 Apr 10 2019 .. -rw-r--r-- 1 ASG SOCAL 23 Apr 10 2019 HEAD drwxr-xr-x 2 ASG SOCAL 4096 Apr 10 2019 branches -rw-r--r-- 1 ASG SOCAL 36 Apr 10 2019 config -rw-r--r-- 1 ASG SOCAL 73 Apr 10 2019 description drwxr-xr-x 2 ASG SOCAL 4096 Apr 10 2019 hooks drwxr-xr-x 2 ASG SOCAL 4096 Apr 10 2019 info drwxr-xr-x 4 ASG SOCAL 4096 Apr 10 2019 refs MVS9 /home/ag110058 cat .git/config
▒?▒▒)▒▒▒▒▒?▒▒▒?▒`▒?▒_/▒▒▒▒▒▒?>▒▒▒▒MVS9 /home/ag110058

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

Ah, I believe I located the issue…

I was trying to clone into a directory on an NFS-mounted filesystem that does not support chtag. Once I switched to a directory on a local filesystem, everything worked as expected. I am somewhat surprised no one else has run into this previously since I don’t believe it represents an uncommon practice.

So, to summarize…

This worked:

OMVS.USR.LOCAL.ZFS 1728000 1193972 534028 70% /usr/local

This didn’t:

/asg/UNIX/public 524288000 353491560 170796440 68% /home/ag110058
esfs001:"/vol/esusers/eshome/ag110058/public"

Problem solved. Thanks.

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

After going through your steps I am still getting this error:
git clone git@github.com:zorts/hello_world.git
Cloning into ‘hello_world’…
FOTS1336 ssh: Could not resolve hostname github.com: EDC9501I The name does not resolve for the supplied parameters.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

I created an ssh key pair and added it to my GitHub account but still getting that error.
I am running git version 2.14.4_zos_b09

Any idea what the problem could be?

Perhaps you can adapt the following script using the details of your git installation, and then run it:

export PREFIX=‘the directory containing bin/git’

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bagder/ca-bundle/master/ca-bundle.crt -o $PREFIX/bin/ca-bundle.crt

mkdir -p $PREFIX/etc

cat > $PREFIX/etc/gitconfig <<end

[http]

sslVerify = true

sslCAinfo = $PREFIX/bin/ca-bundle.crt

end

Alternatively, find the “git config” web page, and search for http.sslCAInfo and/or http.sslCAPath.

In this post I will walk through the steps necessary to clone a repository from GitHub using Rocket’s port of git for z/OS.

Much of the content in this post is contained in the release notes for git for z/OS.

In a nutshell

These instructions will suffice for readers already familiar with git, ssh, GitHub, and Unix System Services on z/OS.

1. Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).
2. Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the git release notes.
3. Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).
4. Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.
5. Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.
6. Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git. A suggested starter repo is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world ;this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC.

A more detailed account

What, that wasn’t enough? OK, here’s a more detailed description.

Install git for z/OS, including its dependencies (bash and perl).

Download the latest version of git for z/OS from the Rocket Open Source download page. You will also need the latest versions of bash and perl. If you don’t already have gzip on z/OS, you will need that, too.

Typically people download the software to a Windows PC and then transfer it to z/OS for installation. Be sure that the transfer is a binary transfer; FTP is a good choice. Note that some transfer methods (notably scp) will unconditionally convert an incoming (to z/OS) file from ASCII to EBCDIC, rendering the file unusable.

Once the files have been downloaded, install them into “an appropriate install location.” If you are just testing the software and don’t have the necessary permissions to install it in a location such as /usr/local, you can just install them into a directory in your home directory.

For more information on unpacking files for installation, see this post on the Rocket Community Forum.

Update: See this forum posting for more detailed installation instructions.

Set up your environment on z/OS for git, as per the release notes.

The git release notes contain detailed information on the necessary environment variables to set for using git.

That said - this script can be put into a file and sourced as needed, or invoked from your .bash_profile at login. Change the value for GIT_ROOT to point to the directory in which you installed git and its prerequisites.

# setup script for bash
#
# NOTE: this can either be added to your .bash_profile OR
#       sourced when needed:
#
#         . <this file name>
#
GIT_ROOT=/path/to/git/installation

export GIT_SHELL=$GIT_ROOT/bin/bash
export GIT_EXEC_PATH=$GIT_ROOT/libexec/git-core
export GIT_TEMPLATE_DIR=$GIT_ROOT/share/git-core/templates

export PATH=$GIT_ROOT/bin:$PATH
export MANPATH=$MANPATH:$GIT_ROOT/man
export PERL5LIB=$PERL5LIB:$GIT_ROOT/lib/perl5

# These enable enhanced ASCII support
export _BPXK_AUTOCVT=ON
export _CEE_RUNOPTS="FILETAG(AUTOCVT,AUTOTAG) POSIX(ON)"
export _TAG_REDIR_ERR=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_IN=txt
export _TAG_REDIR_OUT=txt

# optional (do once): set git editor to create comments on encoding ISO8859-1
# git config --global core.editor "/bin/vi -W filecodeset=ISO8859-1"

Create an account on GitHub (if you don’t already have one).

Go to GitHub and follow the instructions there for creating an account. This is necessary because the only git access protocol currently supported by git for z/OS is the ssh protocol; the “git” and “http” protocols are not supported.

Generate an ssh key pair on z/OS.

See the instructions on GitHub for generating an ssh key pair more detail. There are a few things not mentioned there that are important:

You need to first create a .ssh directory in your home directory, and make sure that the path to that directory is not writable by anyone but you. Here are a typical set of commands to do this. Do NOT type the comments at the end of each command line.

$ cd ~           # cd to your home directory
$ chmod 755 .    # allow others to read and traverse your home directory,
                 # but not write into it. If you don't want ANYONE to be
                 # able to read your home directory, change to 700.
$ mkdir .ssh     # create the .ssh directory
$ chmod 755      # allow others to read this directory but not write into it.

Now you can create an ssh key pair. A description of public key encryption is beyond the scope of this article, but the important concept is that a key pair consists of a public key and a private key. You share the public key with other servers you wish to access, and keep the private key carefully protected on your own system. ssh will use them both to establish a secure communication channel between the local system and the remote (and untrusted) server.

You can generate an appropriate key pair with this command:

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa -C "yourid@yourdomain.com" -P ""
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Your identification has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.
Your public key has been saved in /u/yourid/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
02:63:a9:bd:23:d0:61:0b:85:36:0b:af:86:71:54:75 yourid@yourdomain.com
$ 

This will create a public key pair and store both pieces in your .ssh directory.

Add the public key to your account on on GitHub.

Follow the instructions on GitHub for adding a new SSH keypair to your account. You will be copying the contents of the newly created public key to GitHub.

Clone the repository using the ssh access method for git.

Go to the repository on GitHub that you wish to clone and click on the green “Clone or download” button towards the right side of the page. A suggested starter repository is https://github.com/zorts/hello_world; this repo contains an example of a .gitattributes file that arranges for text files to be encoded and tagged as EBCDIC. Make sure you chose the SSH URL. Copy the URL and then insert it into this command on z/OS:

$ git clone <URL from GitHub>

This will clone the repository on your local z/OS machine.

What’s next?

Once you have successfully cloned a repository you can begin working with its files using git.

An important issue when using source from git is handling the ASCII/EBCDIC encoding issue. There are detailed instructions on this in the git release notes, but to summarize, you will need to create a .gitattributes file that identifies how to encode the files in the working directory. Some files must be encoded using ASCII, most notably the .gitattributes and .gitignore files. A good starting point for a .gitattributes file is:

# encode all files as EBCDIC unless mentioned elsewhere
*       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=ibm-1047

# encode selected files as ASCII
.gitattributes   git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1
.gitignore       git-encoding=iso8859-1 working-tree-encoding=iso8859-1

You will need to become familiar with the features of IBM’s enhanced ASCII support, including file tagging and automatic conversion.

After going through your steps I am still getting this error:
git clone git@github.com:zorts/hello_world.git
Cloning into ‘hello_world’…
FOTS1336 ssh: Could not resolve hostname github.com: EDC9501I The name does not resolve for the supplied parameters.
fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Please make sure you have the correct access rights
and the repository exists.

I created an ssh key pair and added it to my GitHub account but still getting that error.
I am running git version 2.14.4_zos_b09

Any idea what the problem could be?

Hi Bill,

Were you able to fix this error? I’m also getting this error while trying to clone the ‘Hello world’ and not sure how to fix it. As specified in this topic, I created a SSH key and added it to my Github profile. Please let me know if any other SSH settings needs to be done in USS.

Thanks…

Hello Arun,

Can you please post the exact error message here?

If it’s the same “Couldn’t resolve host” message - does the oping command give the same message?

oping github.com

Regards,
Vladimir