Basic Git Setup

Every time I change my computer or my operating system¹, one of the first things I have to do is to configure Git. This article simply covers the basic Git settings that I always adjust.

So, here’s what I’d typically do:

# user identity
$ git config --global user.name "Bozhidar Batsov"
$ git config --global user.email bozhidar@example.com
# editor to use by default for things like commit messages
$ git config --global core.editor emacs
# auto-rebase when pulling
$ git config --global pull.rebase true
# auto-convert CRLF to LF
# useful if you're working on Windows and there are people on your team who are working on Unix
$ git config --global core.autocrlf true
# the name of the primary branch (formerly known as master)
# that's a pretty recent setting, but it's useful for new projects
$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

I guess for many people it’d also be useful to specify their preferred merge tool:

$ git config --global merge.tool some-tool

To me, however, that’s irrelevant as almost all of the time I’m interacting with Git via Magit. If you’re looking for an excuse to try out Emacs, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better excuse than Magit.

The global Git user settings are simply stored under ~/.gitconfig, so you can easily review and update them there as well. You can check your current configuration by running this command:

$ git config --list

Note that this effective configuration would be a combination of OS-wide config (e.g. /etc/gitconfig), your user-wide config (e.g. ~/.gitconfig) and the config of the Git repo that you’re currently in (e.g. `repo/.git/config).

When working on company projects, I would change for each company repository my email to whatever my work email is:

$ cd company-project
$ git config user.email bozhidar@company.com

If you’re working on multiple company repositories the above solution will quickly become annoying. In such cases you may want to use Git conditional includes, which basically allow you to include a different configuration file in your main Git config, based so on some rules.² In our case we can have a different configuration for the e-mail based on the repository directory path. Here’s an example .gitconfig to illustrate this:

[includeIf "gitdir:personal/"]
  path = .gitconfig-personal
[includeIf "gitdir:work/"]
  path = .gitconfig-work

Now, any Git repository under a folder called personal (anywhere on your file system) will use the personal email address, and any repository under a folder called work will use your work email address. This matches my preference to keep my personal projects under ~/projects/personal and the work under ~/projects/work.

The contents of .gitconfig-personal can be something like:

[user]
  email = bozhidar@home.com

And the contents of .gitconfig-work can be something like:

[user]
  email = bozhidar@work.com

And that’s it. Turns out my basic Git setup is pretty basic. Check out this section of the official docs for an expanded coverage of the topic. You can find way more configuration options here.

That’s all I have for you today. I’d appreciate it if you shared in the comments some snippets of Git configuration that you consider essential.

1. This has been happening quite often recently and I’ll cover it in a separate article or two. ↩

2. Special thanks to my readers who suggested this setup to me. ↩