2. Configuration

2.1. Customising Git

Git is a very powerful and complex tool. Thus, it allows you to customise it according to your personal needs. Customisations can be made for several settings, such as:

  • Personal user details

  • Aliases

  • Preferred editor

  • Push strategy

  • Hooks

2.2. Configuration Utility

The git command line utility provides an interface to configure itself:

git config
usage: git config [<options>]

By default, git config is looking up configuration options in the following order:

Description

Configuration File

git config location flag

Local repository specific configuration

.git/config

--local

Global user specific configuration

~/.gitconfig

--global

System-wide configuration file

/etc/gitconfig

--system

Hint

These configuration files are plain-text. You can also set the configuration options in the file directly instead via CLI.

See also

If you want to get deeper details into the config utility, have a look at man git-config, git config --help or the Customizing Git - Git Configuration chapter of the official docs.

2.3. List Config Options

To display the configuration options you can run the list command:

git config -l [location-flag]
git config --list [location-flag]

Hint

If you want to show the origin of the setting, add the --show-origin flag to the list command above.

2.4. Set Config Options

To set a configuration option, use the following command:

git config [location-flag] name value

2.5. User & Email

In your Git lifetime you’ll come along to several Git config options. However, the probably most common ones are:

  • user.name: Your name (most likely your real name)

  • user.email: Your e-mail address

Important

These configuration options are quite important, because they will be used in every commit of yours. This is becoming even more important later on, when you’re working with Git collaboration platforms.

2.6. Editor

When working with Git, there are several occasions when an editor is opened. For example when providing a commit message or adding hunks.

Git uses the configured default editor of the OS. If you want to overwrite that, use the following setting:

  • core.editor: Name of the editor executable

2.7. Aliases

The git command also supports aliases. Git aliases are basically the same as bash aliases, except for the following facts:

  • You still use git … as bash command

  • Git supports you in case of misspellings

Hint

Git aliases might be helpful to people who’re migrating from Subversion to Git, as they often miss svn st and alike.