Commits not showing up on GitHub contributions graph

My articles are for beginners who don’t know much about programming, I’m trying to explain things as simple as I can without using a lot of technical words.

I recently formatted my MacBook Pro, set up my development environment and pushed some changes to a personal project that I’m currently working on. Surprisingly, all my new commits were not showing on my contributions graph! How frustrating is that?

Contributions don’t count towards my contributions.

After skimming through GitHub’s documentation, I found that commits will only appear if they meet the conditions below:

• Criteria 1: The commits were made in a standalone repository, not a fork.
• Criteria 2: The commits were made: In the repository’s default branch (usually master) or In the gh-pages branch (for repositories with project sites)
• Criteria 3: The email address used for the commits is associated with your GitHub account.

So if you meet the Criteria 1 and 2, you probably have a mismatch between your local Git email address and the email on your GitHub account.

Ok ok, so how do I fix that ?

Step 1: On your Github account Go to Settings section located on the top right corner of the page or you can simply navigate to the following url -> https://github.com/settings/profile

Step 2: Then go to the Emails Section

The Primary email address should match the one on your local Git.

“Ok, so how do I know my local Git email address ?”

Step 3: On your local machine, open terminal and run the command below

git config --global user.email

Result:

git config --global user.email
soufiane.dev@example.com

In my case, I had a mismatch between the two email addresses:

• My local git email was soufiane.dev@example.com
• My remote Github email is soufiane@example.com

That explains why my commits are not showing on my contributions graph.

Step 4: Run the command below to change your local Git email address to match your GitHub account email address.

git config --global user.email "YOUR_GITHUB_EMAIL_ADDRESS"

Now, both addresses should match.

Step 5: Run the command below to confirm that you have set the email address correctly in your local Git:

git config --global user.email

Step 5: All set! Now you can commit and push your changes to Github and it will show on your contributions graph!

I hope this helps! Comment down below if you have any questions.