I work on a single device and use it for both my office work and side/pet/personal projects. Default git credentials for the device is obviously the one provided by my office. Now, this scenario has happened to me a lot of times -
- My office work is done
- I am super excited about a personal project idea
- So I set up a remote git repository
- Set up the project boilerplate locally
- Fire
git init
,git remote add
,git add
,git commit
& PUSH!!!
And it is then when I realize I have pushed code to my personal git with wrong (office) credentials. And I start all over again.
Do let me know if you have ever faced a similar situation like mine in comments!
So, now what is the solution? How do I have separate git config on a single machine? The answer is pretty simple. You need to have two separate Git config files. But, how ? Read on...
*** Before starting make sure you have git version 2.13 or higher installed in your system. ***
$ git --version
git version 2.14.2
Now with the prerequisites set, let's begin -
- Your
.gitconfig
resides in your home directory. For Windows users, it will be in the pathC:\Users\[YOUR_NAME]
. Go to that directory. - Create two separate folders like My_Office_Workspace & My_Personal_Workspace.
- Create two separate
.gitconfig
files, one for office and another for personal usage in the pathC:\Users\[YOUR_NAME]
. Let's name them.gitconfig-office
&.gitconfig-personal
.
The contents of .gitconfig-office
-
# This is Git's per-user configuration file.
[user]
name = YOUR_OFFICE_GIT_USERNAME
email = your.name@company.com
The contents of .gitconfig-personal
-
# This is Git's per-user configuration file.
[user]
name = YOUR_PERSONAL_GIT_USERNAME
email = your.name@gmail.com
- After that's done, open up the
.gitconfig
file, and make the necessary changes. It should look like -
[includeIf "gitdir:~/My_Office_Workspace/"]
path = .gitconfig-office
[includeIf "gitdir:~/My_Personal_Workspace/"]
path = .gitconfig-personal
Configuration done! Now let's verify.
- Goto My_Office_Workspace and clone a project from your office GitHub, BitBucket or GitLab. Let's call the project My_Office_Project and do the following -
$ cd My_Office_Workspace/
$ git clone https://github.my_office.com/VeryImportant/My_Office_Project.git
$ cd My_Office_Project/
$ git config user.name
YOUR_OFFICE_GIT_USERNAME
- You can also do the same for your personal projects under My_Perosonal_Workspace, but you will see you the output for the last command
git config user.name
is YOUR_PERSONAL_GIT_USERNAME.
Woohoo, it's done! No more messing up. π
Update
If your projects are in a different drive on Windows, for eg. D or F, then you can configure the .gitconfig
like this
[includeIf "gitdir:D:/My_Office_Workspace/"]
path = .gitconfig-office
[includeIf "gitdir:F:/My_Personal_Workspace/"]
path = .gitconfig-personal
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I am Soham Mondal, a developer from India. You can follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, or GitHub. You can learn more about me on my website. I am currently open to new projects & job offers.
Top comments (8)
This is perfect!
Just incase anyone who want to
git clone
a private repo on your secondary account and it showsfatal: repo not found
Clone with the following:
git clone username@github.com/repoName
Now it will prompt you for password
Thank you for pointing that out! :)
This is such a relatable problem Soham. Nice article and congrats on your first post.
Thank you! :)
Very helpful. Thanks for it.
Thanks Asif!
I tried this it's not working for me it's always showing one user details only.
can you help me?
Hey, sorry for the delayed response. I will try to help you.
What OS are you on and also please share your git version and .gitconfig file contents.