When the gitconfig is stored with a preceeding . i.e. .gitconfig the plugin has problems to find/read it. I have observed this with the configuration for self-signed ssl certificates, similar to the issue JENKINS-48334

My Setup

I have ...

• git for Windows installed on the Jenkins Server under *D:\TOOLS\Git*
• jenkins configured so that the git-plugin uses D:\TOOLS\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe
• a Bitbucket with a self-signed certificate
• a Certificate chain ca-chain.pem can be found under D:\TOOLS\Git\mingw64\ssl\certs (contains the full CA-chain required to reconsider the certificate from stash/bitbucket as valid)

• a .gitconfig file in the home directory of the user who runs jenkins service (let's call him 'jenkinsuser'
• the .gitconfig file contains the following configuration

[http]

    sslcainfo = /ssl/certs/ca-chain.pem

    sslVerify = true

My Observations

When I (jenkinsuser)

• run git ls-remote -h https://bitbucket/scm/test/test.git all works fine
• try to setup the reopository URL (SCM Git Plugin) in my jenkins job I get the following error:

{{Failed to connect to repository : Command "D:\TOOLS\Git\mingw64\bin\git.exe ls-remote -h https://bitbucket/scm/test/test.git HEAD" returned status code 128: }}
{{stdout: }}
stderr: fatal: unable to access 'https://bitbucket/scm/test/test.git ': error setting certificate verify locations: CAfile: D:/TOOLS/Git/mingw64/libexec/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt CApath: none

When I rename the file from .gitconfig to gitconfig Jenkins has no problems.

The same can be observed if you rename the D:\TOOLS\Git\mingw64\etc\gitconfig to .gitconfig

Again when calling git form command line the name .gitconfig or gitconfig does not make any difference, both work fine.