Conditional overriding of Git configurations for single and multiple repositories

Have you ever created or cloned a Git repository for work on your personal machine or vice-versa, and accidentally made a commit with the global Git email? It happens to the best of us.

In general, Git stores its configuration properties within the global configuration file ~/.gitconfig in your home directory. Sometimes you may want to change your configuration for specific projects/repositories, e.g. if you’re working within different contexts like private projects vs. work projects vs. university projects.

Single repository

All you need to do is adding your intended configuration to .git/config within the respective repository. For example, to change your name or email address for commits, simply add the following contents within that configuration file.

[user]
  name = John Doe
  email = j.doe@work.com

(You can also simply run git config user.name "John Doe" and git config "user.email j.doe@work.com" within the repository.)

Because .git/config is not part of the versioning (but actually its configuration—who would have thought), this change is only in place for your local repository clone.

Multiple repositories

However, if you’re having multiple affected repositories, this is quite time-consuming and has to be done for each and every repository individually. The good news: there is a more scalable way! Using Git’s conditional includes, you can override your global configuration for specific path patterns within ~/.gitconfig in your home directory.

# ~/.gitconfig

[user]
  name = John Doe
  email = john.doe@gmail.com

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Repositories/work-*/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig-work

[includeIf "gitdir:~/University/Code/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig-university

This tells Git to load the Git configuration file at ~/.gitconfig-work for all repositories within ~/Repositories starting with the prefix work- (e.g. work-cart-api or work-assets) while ~/.gitconfig-university is loaded for all repositories within the directory ~/University/Code. For every other repository, the global default configuration will be used.

The respective conditional configuration files could look like as follows.

# ~/.gitconfig-work

[user]
  email = j.doe@work.com

# ~/.gitconfig-university

[user]
  name = John Michael Doe
  email = john.doe@university.edu

(Git also supports the keyword gitdir/i instead of gitdir which will match the provided pattern case-insensitively.)

You can verify whether your desired configuration is used by running git config user.name or git config user.email within your respective repository.

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