How to maintain directory level git configs
When working with multiple git profiles, managing different git configs is hard. For example, you may be working on three repositories A-first-project, A-second-project and B-first-project, commits for which need to be from different E-Mail IDs. What’s the best way to acheive this?
For example, lets assume you want to use E-Mail [email protected] for commits in A-first-project and A-second-project, but the E-Mail [email protected] for B-first-project.
One option will be to navigate to each repository and run git config user.email <[email protected]> in each of them, but that is not scalable because that is something which needs to be done each time you clone or create a new repository. So, is there a better way? Turns out, there is - using conditionals and directory level git configs.
Note that this needs atleast git 2.13 to work.
First, you need to structure your repositories in a fashion like this, for example:
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.
└── ~ # ~ refers to your home directory
└── workspaces
└── company_A
├── .gitconfig
├── /A-first-project/
└── /A-second-project/
└── personal
├── .gitconfig
└── /B-first-project/
Now, time to add conditionals to your your global gitconfig, which should reside at ~/.gitconfig. (if it doesn’t exist, run git config --global user.name "<Your Name>" to generate it.)
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$ vi ~/.gitconfig
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[user]
name = Ayush Gupta
[includeIf "gitdir:~/workspaces/company_A/"] # for all git repositories in `~/workspaces/company_A/`
path = ~/workspaces/company_A/.gitconfig # override global git config with the config file at this path
[includeIf "gitdir:~/workspaces/personal/"] # for all git repositories in `~/workspaces/personal/`
path = ~/workspaces/personal/.gitconfig # override global git config with the config file at this path
Now, modify ~/workspaces/company_A/.gitconfig and ~/workspaces/personal/.gitconfig as follows:
~/workspaces/company_A/.gitconfig:
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$ vi ~/workspaces/company_A/.gitconfig
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[user]
email = [email protected]
~/workspaces/personal/.gitconfig:
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$ vi ~/workspaces/personal/.gitconfig
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[user]
email = [email protected]
And you’re done. To try it out:
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$ cd ~/workspaces/company_A/A-first-project/
$ git config user.email
[email protected]
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$ cd ~/workspaces/personal/B-first-project/
$ git config user.email
[email protected]