How to tell git to use the correct identity (name and email) for a given project?

git config user.email "[email protected]"

Doing that one inside a repo will set the configuration on THAT repo, and not globally.

Seems like that's pretty much what you're after, unless I'm misreading you.

You need to use the local set command below:

local set

git config user.email [email protected]
git config user.name 'Mahmoud Zalt'

local get

git config --get user.email
git config --get user.name

The local config file is in the project directory: .git/config.

global set

git config --global user.email [email protected]
git config --global user.name 'Mahmoud Zalt'

global get

git config --global --get user.email
git config --global --get user.name

The global config file in in your home directory: ~/.gitconfig.

Remember to quote blanks, etc, for example: 'FirstName LastName'

Edit the config file with in ".git" folder to maintain the different username and email depends upon the repository

• Go to Your repository
• Show the hidden files and go to ".git" folder
• Find the "config" file
• Add the below lines at EOF

[user]

name = Bob

email = [email protected]

This below command show you which username and email set for this repository.

git config --get user.name

git config --get user.email

Example: for mine that config file in D:\workspace\eclipse\ipchat\.git\config

Here ipchat is my repo name

If you use git config user.email "[email protected]" it will be bound to the current project you are in.

That is what I do for my projects. I set the appropriate identity when I clone/init the repo. It is not fool-proof (if you forget and push before you figure it out you are hosed) but it is about as good as you can get without the ability to say git config --global user.email 'ILLEGAL_VALUE'

Actually, you can make an illegal value. Set your git config --global user.name $(perl -e 'print "x"x968;')

Then if you forget to set your non-global values you will get an error message.

[EDIT] On a different system I had to increase the number of x to 968 to get it to fail with "fatal: Impossibly long personal identifier". Same version of git. Strange.

As of Git 2.13 you can use an includeIf in your gitconfig to include a file with a different configuration based on the path of the repository where you are running your git commands.

Since a new enough Git comes with Ubuntu 18.04 I've been using this in my ~/.gitconfig quite happily.

[include]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.alias # I like to keep global aliases separate
  path = ~/.gitconfig.defaultusername # can maybe leave values unset/empty to get warned if a below path didn't match
# If using multiple identities can use per path user/email
# The trailing / is VERY important, git won't apply the config to subdirectories without it
[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/azure/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.azure # user.name and user.email for Azure
[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/gitlab/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.gitlab # user.name and user.email for GitLab
[includeIf "gitdir:~/projects/foss/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig.github # user.name and user.email for GitHub

https://motowilliams.com/conditional-includes-for-git-config#disqus_thread

To use Git 2.13 you will either need to add a PPA (Ubuntu older than 18.04/Debian) or download the binaries and install (Windows/other Linux).