Shorts: Use specific Git configuration per directory

Ah! My commit has the wrong author name and email!!

Using the same computer for different projects that need different identities or settings can sometimes accidentally leak unwanted information, not reconise you in the system, etc.

The good news is that Git makes it easy to manage configurations at a folder level, here you’ll find a way to tailor the configuration to your need.

A typical setup has the author information configured at the global level, which lives in ~/.config/git/config (or ~/.gitconfig), for example:

[user]
  name = Bob Happyperson
  email = [email protected]

This is used for every git command you execute, but that’s not quite what you want. You want to control that at the folder level and to do that you’ll use includeIf.

Let’s go through an example:

Assume you have three project categories, Personal, Internal work and Client One, where each of them require a different author email and SSH key.

projects/
├─ personal/
├─ internal/
├─ client-one/

With that, create a gitconfig inside of each of these folders with the values you’d like to overwrite.

Here is an example for Client One:

# File location: projects/client-one/gitconfig

[user]
  email = [email protected]

[core]
  sshCommand = "ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_client_one"

After creating all the specific configuration files, go to your global Git configuration and add the following:

# File location: ~/.config/git/config or ~/.gitconfig

# ... file content ...

[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/personal/"]
  path = "~/projects/personal/gitconfig"

[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/internal/"]
  path = "~/projects/internal/gitconfig"

[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/client-one/"]
  path = "~/projects/client-one/gitconfig"

From now on, Git will use the values you added in the more specific file instead of the global one.