Git Config: A Tiny Reference

Just a small guide to git config..

4 min readMay 26, 2019

A powerful, yet, often neglected tool in the git tool shed.

What is git config?

In short, git config is a set of commands which allow you to set/access git configuration variables. These variables can be stored at three different levels:

Local (Current repo)
Global (Current logged-in system user)
System (At the system level).

git config lets you get and set configuration variables that control all aspects of how git looks and behaves.

If no scope is specified: local is the default, given that you are currently within a git repository directory where a .git folder is present ,or else the default is global.

Why should you care?

According to the Atlassian git documentation:
“Becoming familiar with git config and the various Git configuration settings will help you create a powerful, customized Git workflow.”

By having basic understanding of git config and its commands; you can make your workflow smoother and more predictable, especially when working in teams.

git config files

For each level; there are corresponding git config files. I made the following table to summarize the basics around the files at each level:

git config commands

The following is a list of common git config commands:

Please note the following:

Local git variables are project specific. So, if you would like to access all git config variables, including the project ones; cd to the repo directory.

git config Variables

Let’s examine (and modify) a typical local git config file.

Start by creating creating a project directory:

mkdir myproj

2. Initialize a git repository there:

git init

This will create a hidden .git folder pertaining to your project.

If your using linux; the .git folder will not be listed when you run the command ls . Instead; run ls -a

3. Navigate to .git/gitconfig:

A basic text file.Here’s how mine looks like:

Here we can see the first, most fundamental git config section: core.Under which we can see the corresponding variables.

4. Making modifications to the file:

The git config is always modified as a response to certain changes in the project. These changes are automatic. An example of that is running

git push:

Compared to the previous image; two sections were automatically added.

There are two ways of manually editing the git config files with cli:

Using the following command:

git config section.variablename “new variable value”

Example:

git config core.filemode true

Example:

git config --global user.name “Ammar Halees”

Using the nano gnu editor:

git config--scope--edit

Please note the following:

Git config variables are cascading; meaning that project-level variables override global-level ones (since they’re more specific to that project). And global-level ones override system-level ones.

Extra : git config File Syntax

You can find more about the syntax here.

The basic structure of a git config file is as follows:

1. The file is divided into sections:

A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins.
Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, - and . are allowed in section names.

Each variable must belong to some section, which means that there must be a section header before the first setting of a variable.

Sub-sections:

Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header:

[section "subsection"]

We can see that in the figure above where: remote is the section name and origin is the sub-section

2. Sections contain variables:

Variables such as name and email for the user section

Variable names adhere to the following:

Variable names are case-insensitive
Allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character.
Some variables may appear multiple times; we say then that the variable is multi-valued.

Hope this was helpful ❤