Git Config

This Post is part of a series about Git, Git concepts, commands and usage patterns to remind me and to help me learn. The first post of the series is Git - A New Years Resolution.

git config lets you view and set configuration variables that control all aspects of how Git looks and operates. These variables can be stored in three different places:

1. /etc/gitconfig file: Contains values applied to every user on the system and all their repositories. If you pass the option --system to git config, it reads and writes from this file specifically. (Because this is a system configuration file, you would need administrative or superuser privilege to make changes to it.)
2. ~/.gitconfig or ~/.config/git/config file: Values specific personally to you, the user. You can make Git read and write to this file specifically by passing the --global option.
3. config file in the Git directory (that is, .git/config) of whatever repository you’re currently using and is specific to that single repository.

Each level overrides values in the previous level, so values in .git/config trump those in /etc/gitconfig.

If you want to check your configuration settings, you can use the git config --list command to list all the settings Git can find at that point. For example,

git config --list
user.name=Martin Pickering
user.email=[email protected]
color.status=auto
color.branch=auto
color.interactive=auto
color.diff=auto
...

Last modified on 2018-01-04