site/content/posts/2021-06-16-multiple-emails-git.md

title	outputs	tags	date	draft	slug	highlight	description
Managing multiple emails for git across different computers	html gemtext	git howto	2021-06-16T23:50:00Z	false	multiple-emails-git	true	How to have different git author configurations depending on the computer and have it tracked with dotfiles.

As someone who code on multiple machines to work on different projects, I like to commit with different emails.

I don't know how everyone else handle different emails in .gitconfig and track dotfiles in a git repo at the same time, but here's the solution I've come up with.

First, I have a global ~/.gitconfig with the default user email and some other global settings (by global I mean same cross different computers I work on).

# ~/.gitconfig
[user]
name = Default Name
email = me@default.email

Then for each machine I have a ~/.gitconfig-local file which can override some settings just for that machine, such as email, signing key, editor, etc.

# ~/.gitconfig-local
[user]
email = me@special.email

Back in the global ~/.gitconfig, I have this snippet that tells git to also look for configuration in my ~/.gitconfig-local:

# ~/.gitconfig
[include]
path = ~/.gitconfig-local

Here, I can have ~/.gitconfig tracked in my dotfiles repo, but I do not have ~/.gitconfig-local tracked. This way, I can put anything I like specific to a particular machine in the ~/.gitconfig-local, as well as SMTP settings such as password, which you wouldn't want to end up in a public git repo.

As to setting it up on a new machine, I have a setup script in my dotfiles repo that creates an empty ~/.gitconfig-local. I use this same method with fish configs -- global config and a local config, you can have a look at them in my dotfiles repo on sourcehut.