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Multiple Git configs on linux system

If you have multiple git accounts and would like to config them in your linux machine, this post is for you. .gitconfig file is starter point for Git to identify what configurations need to be used.

Create separate directories for repos

Organize the projects that you are working on into separate folders by the profiles you want to work with. For example let’s say there are two Git profiles you are working with. This is a common use case for most of us:

  • WORK: for work related projects
  • PERSONAL: for open source and side projects

Create a global Git configuration

Create the global .gitconfig file in your home directory if it doesn’t already exist. Then add all the profile directories as an entry like in the example below.

The way this works is very intuitive – if the directory path where you created the Git directory matches one of the paths in inclideIF, then Git uses that particular profile configuration file. Otherwise, it uses the default configuration.

[includeIf "gitdir:~/personal/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig-personal
[includeIf "gitdir:~/work/"]
  path = ~/.gitconfig-work

Create individual Git configurations for profiles

If you haven’t noticed by now, we just mentioned the .gitconfig-personal and .gitconfig-work files in the global .gitconfig file, but we didn’t create them yet. These individual files can contain all the customization that you need, from username and email to commit hooks.

~/.gitconfig-work will contain:

[user]
 name = work_user
 email = work_email

~/.gitconfig-personal will contain:

[user]
 name = personal_user
 email = personal_email

We can configure git to use a custom SSH command like above by setting core.sshCommand with corresponding public key personal_user_key connected with the git account.

[user]
 name = personal_user
 email = personal_email
[core]
 sshCommand = "ssh -i ~/.ssh/personal_user_key"

Now all repo in ~/personal/ will be associated with .gitconfig-personal git account and repos in ~/work/ will be associated with .gitconfig-work git account.