Different Emails Addresses for Different Git Repositories

Sometimes, we may want to set up different user emails and user names for different Git repositories. For example, in your personal computer, the user.email is set to your personal email address globally. While committing to your corporate repositories in the personal computer, your corporate email address should be used in the commits. Or you’re working on personal projects on the corporate computer, need to use the personal email for the personal repositories.

Configure Email Address for A Repository

The simplest way is going to each repository, and configuring the user email for each repository specifically.

$ cd /path/to/repo-foo
$ git config user.email email.foo@example.com
$ git config user.name name-foo

The above git config commands write the user.email setting into the .git/config file under the repository.

From git help config, when writing configuration, by default it’s writing to the repository-local configuration file.

When writing, the new value is written to the repository local configuration file by default, and options –system, –global, –worktree, –file can be used to tell the command to write to that location

Examine the Email Address for a Repository

$ cd /path/to/repo-foo
$ git config --list | grep user.email
user.email=email.bar@example.com
user.email=email.foo@example.com

The git config --list above prints more than one user.email values. It’s because, without additional options, the git config --list outputs configuration “merged” from system, global and local.

From git help config,

When reading, the values are read from the system, global and repository local configuration files by default

The git config --list is a read operation. The first user.email value above is from “global”, i.e. ~/.gitconfig. Run git config --list --local | grep user.email to check the repository-local email configuration.

Instead of piping config --list and grep, use git config --get user.email to save some typings.

$ cd /path/to/repo-foo
$ git config --get user.email
user.email=email.foo@example.com

From git help config, --get returns

the last value if multiple key values were found.

Here, the last value is the email from repository-local configuration. The --get can be further omitted, git config user.email has the same result. And git config --get-all user.email is same as git config --list | grep user.email.

Conditional Includes

For new cloned repositories, it’s often to forget to configure the right email addresses for them. The “conditional includes” feature of the git config can save us from this problem.

For example, in your personal computer, all corporate repositories are under ~/corp-repo/. Add a text file called corp-gitconfig there, and edit it as below.

[user]
        name = user-name-for-corp-prj
        email = email-add@your-corp.com

Add below lines in the global git config file, i.e. ~/.gitconfig.

[includeIf "gitdir:~/corp-repo/"]
        path = ~/corp-repo/corp-gitconfig

Now if a new repository is cloned user ~/corp-repo/, the email for that repository is automatically set to email-add@your-corp.com.