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Configuring git

The first time you tried to commit using git, you might have gotten a prompt like the one below:

$ git commit
*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

Git needs to know who you are when you create a commit. When you are working collaboratively, you should be able to see who modified what parts of the project and when, and thus, git has been designed to create commits tied to a name and an email.

There are multiple ways to provide the git commit command with your email and name, and we'll go through some of them below.

Global Config

When you store something in the global config, it is accessible system wide in all the repositories you work on. This is the preferred way and works for most use cases.

To store something in the global config, you use the config command as follows:

$ git config --global <variable name> <value>

In the case of user details, we run it as follows:

$ git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Repository Config

As the name says, these configurations are scoped to your current repository. If you want to commit to a particular repository, say, a work related project, with your company's email, then you could use this method.

To store something in the repository config, you use the config command by omitting the --global flag as follows:

$ git config <variable name> <value>

In the case of user details, we run it as follows:

$ git config user.email "you@alternate.com"
$ git config user.name "Your Name"

Command-line Config

These type of configurations are scoped to the current command only. All git commands take -c arguments before the action verb to set temporary configuration data.

To store something in the command line config, run your command as follows:

$ git -c <variable-1>=<value> -c <variable-2>=<value> <command>

In our example, we would run the commit command as follows:

git -c user.name='Your Name' -c user.email='you@example.com' commit -m "Your commit message"

Note on Precedence

Among the three methods described here, the precedence order is command-line > repository > global. This means that, if a variable is configured in the command-line as well as globally, the command-line value would be used for the operation.

Beyond User Details

We have dealt with only the user details till now while working with the config. However, there are several other configuration options available. Some of them are:

  1. core.editor - to specify the name of the editor used for writing commit messages, etc.
  2. commit.template - to specify a file on the system as the initial commit template.
  3. color.ui - to specify a boolean value for using colors in git's output.

We have abstracted some details for ease of understanding. For further reading, head over to git-scm.com.