Setting your user name and email

You need to set who you are before creating any commit. That will allow commits to have the right author name and email associated to them.

It has nothing to do with authentication when pushing to a remote repository (e.g. when pushing to a remote repository using your GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab account)

To declare that identity for all repositories, use git config --global

This will store the setting in your user’s .gitconfig file: e.g. $HOME/.gitconfig or for Windows, %USERPROFILE%\.gitconfig.

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

To declare an identity for a single repository, use git config inside a repo.

This will store the setting inside the individual repository, in the file $GIT_DIR/config. e.g. /path/to/your/repo/.git/config.

cd /path/to/my/repo
git config user.name "Your Login At Work"
git config user.email mail_at_work@example.com

Settings stored in a repository’s config file will take precedence over the global config when you use that repository.

Tips: if you have different identities (one for open-source project, one at work, one for private repos, …), and you don’t want to forget to set the right one for each different repos you are working on:

• Remove a global identity

git config --global --remove-section user.name
git config --global --remove-section user.email

• To force git to look for your identity only within a repository’s settings, not in the global config:

git config --global user.useConfigOnly true

That way, if you forget to set your user.name and user.email for a given repository and try to make a commit, you will see:

no name was given and auto-detection is disabled
no email was given and auto-detection is disabled