Recently, there’s this one cafe in which I seemingly can’t access Git every time I use their Wi-Fi. I can’t push, pull, or fetch anything. Every git command which involves a remote server is either refused to connect or always timed out. I had to use my mobile data, which is annoying and not good for my wallet.

The Culprit

It turned out that the ISP which the café use (I’m going to name and shame here: N‌exa 🤡) has blocked any kind of SSH access. I found out because I figured I can not SSH into my VPS instance as well.

I don’t know why some ISP does this weird blocking of SSH port. This may also happen to you if you’re using an internal company network. But fortunately, GitHub and some other Git providers have thought of this, and provided us with a way to connect with their server via SSH-over-HTTPS. If you’ve heard of DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH), it’s kind of a similar stuff, but with SSH instead!

Using SSH-over-HTTPS

To check if SSH-over-HTTPS on GitHub is possible from your ISP, you can check using this command:

$ ssh -T -p 443 [email protected]
> Hi [user]! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

Then, in your global .gitconfig file, insert this line or modify the existing config if it already exists:

[url "ssh://[email protected]:443/"]
    insteadOf = https://github.com/

# OR, depending on your usage or remote urls:

[url "ssh://[email protected]:443/"]
    insteadOf = [email protected]:

This will basically replace all remote url fetch of https://github.com/ and [email protected]: into ssh://[email protected]:443/ . Note that whether this works or not depends on your ISP. If your ISP is smart enough, it may still detect that you’re using the SSH protocol and block connection attempts. So good luck!

(and pardon my silly doodle in the thumbnail)