Directory Scoped Git Configuration
I have always had a problem with the configuration of different email addresses in different git repositories. The git configuration is split into a global (~/.gitconfig) and a local/repository part (project_dir/.git/config). This works only for simple setups with one default configuration and 1-2 exceptions with per-repo overrides.
But it does not work for me, I have multiple different repositories checked out and I always forget to configure the right email address after the git clone. And it is not only “normal/private” vs. “work” address but I also have multiple addresses for different customers and open source projects. It’s a mess.
Today I finally learned about a working solution for this with git-config conditional includes. These were introduced in 2017 with git 2.13 and I found them via StackOverflow.
With conditional includes I can have multiple configuration files to overwrite the global values like these two files:
# ~/.gitconfig-bsd [user] name = Martin Schütte email = mschuett@netbsd.org
# ~/.gitconfig-work [user] name = Martin Schütte email = martin.schuette@example.org
Now my global ~/.gitconfig does two things: it sets a default value, and it also specifies the overwrite files depending on the directory tree:
# ~/.gitconfig [user] name = Martin Schütte email = info@mschuette.name # ... [includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/work/"] path = ~/.gitconfig-work [includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/bsd/"] path = ~/.gitconfig-bsd
The gitdir directories are prefixes because git will add “**”, thus recursively matching all paths below that directory. So as long as there is some hierarchy in the file system this works.