I have tryed different approaches to use a Github private repository reference in a Rails application Gemfile.
1) Gemfile:
gem 'my_gem', :git => "https://#{github_user}:#{github_pw}@github.com/me/my_gem.git"
Result from 'git push heroku':
Fetching https://user:pw@github.com/me/my_gem.git
error: The requested URL returned error: 401 while accessing https://user:pw@github.com/me/my_gem.git/info/refs
Git error: command `git clone 'https://user:pw@github.com/me/my_gem.git' "/tmp/build_2wxmqutch8gy7/vendor/bundle/jruby/1.9/cache/bundler/git/my_gem-929bddeee3dd4a564c2689e189190073df01431e" --bare --no-hardlinks` in directory /tmp/build_2wxmqutch8gy7 has failed.
Dependencies installed
Then I found this article https://help.github.com/articles/creating-an-oauth-token-for-command-line-use and created an OAuth token.
2) Gemfile:
gem 'my_gem', :git => "https://#{github_oauth_token}@github.com/me/my_gem.git"
Result from 'git push heroku':
Fetching https://0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567@github.com/me/my_gem.git
Password:
Heroku stall and prompt for a password.
On my local machine both:
git clone https://user:pw@github.com/me/my_gem.git
and
git clone https://0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef01234567@github.com/me/my_gem.git
works perfekt!
Local:
# git --version
git version 1.7.9.5
Heroku:
# heroku run git --version
git version 1.7.0