Setting Username and Email
Before making your first commit, it's essential to tell Git who you are. Git uses your username and email address to label every commit you make. This helps with collaboration, tracking changes, and understanding project history.
Why this is important
Git doesn’t require an account to use locally, but every commit is tagged with a name and email. Without setting these, your commits may be anonymous or incorrectly attributed.
If you're using GitHub or another remote service, the email you configure should match the one associated with your account to link commits to your profile.
Set Global Username and Email
To configure Git with your details, open a terminal or command prompt and run:
git config --global user.name "Your Full Name"
git config --global user.email "your.email@example.com"
In the above example --global tells Git to use these settings for all repositories on your system.
Example:
git config --global user.name "Tom Fynes"
git config --global user.email "tom.fynesn@example.com"
Set Username and Email for a Specific Repository
If you want to use different details for a particular project you can use the following:
- Navigate to the project directory:
cd path/to/your/project
Set local configuration:
git config user.name "Project-Specific Name"
git config user.email "project@example.com"
This overrides the global settings only for that repository.
Check Your Configuration
If you need to check what your current config looks like you can do this by using:
git config --list
This will output something like:
user.name=Tom Fynes
user.email=tom.fynes@example.com
And To check values from a specific scope, you can do the following:
git config --global --list # Global values
git config --local --list # Repository-specific values