A little bit of back story…
I only have 1 laptop which is a Macbook and I like it very much for development work. I am also very stingy so I can’t justify shedding thousands of dollars to buy my own personal Mac machine. What ended up happening was that I found out that I’ve been commiting to public Github repositories with my work email… Cue panicking and some rebase later…
I found out that I need to update my git config to use my non-work email but I didn’t want to have to keep editing between the two credentials whenever I decide to work on my personal projects.
After a bit of Googling and digging around, I discovered the way to seamlessly change my credentials when I perform a commit.
The steps
The following guide is only applicable to MacOS.
- In your favourite terminal, navigate to where your
.gitconfigfile is. Usually in your home directory:
cd ~That command should do the trick.
- I need 2 different credentials, 1 for work and 1 for personal projects. So in the user directory, I create 2 new git config files like this:
touch .gitconfig-work
touch .gitconfig-personal- Within the 2 files, I set correct credentials for my commit.
In .gitconfig-personal
[user]
name = personal-name
email = [email protected]In .gitconfig-work
[user]
name = work-name
email = [email protected]- Now, I need to set up Git so that it works when and where to use which credentials. For this, I edit
.gitconfigfile and add.
[includeIf "gitdir:<PATH_TO_PERSONAL_REPOS>"]
path = .gitconfig-personal
[includeIf "gitdir:<PATH_TO_WORK_REPO>"]
path = .gitconfig-workNotes
- If you use Github like me, you should make sure that the
emailmatches your account email and thenamematches your username on Github so that Github can recognise you. Otherwise, your contribution might go to lost.