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Git-Config Essentials

How to Set and Inspect Baseline Configuration Values

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Every Git installation needs configuring. The git-config documentation clocks in at a novella-length 35,000 words. So over a series of posts in 2022, we’ll look at numerous little-known but useful configuration values for Git. The goal of this series is not just to add lines to your ~/.gitconfig, but to change how you work with Git—while taming some of its weirder, mildly irritating default behaviors.

Setting Baseline Git Configuration Values

In this post, let’s look at the basics. If you’ve run Git on the command line, you’ve probably used git config to set some essential configuration values.

At minimum, you should set your user.name and user.email, which Git attaches to your commits:

$ git config --global user.name "Darth Vader"
$ git config --global user.email "vader@deathstar.example.com"

That used to suffice. But beginning with version 2.27, Git will throw a finger-wagging warning if you attempt to interact with a remote branch whose changes differ from your own:

warning: Pulling without specifying how to reconcile divergent branches is discouraged. You can squelch this message by running one of the following commands sometime before your next pull:
  git config pull.rebase false  # merge (the default strategy)
  git config pull.rebase true   # rebase 
  git config pull.ff only       # fast-forward only

We’ll look at the pull.rebase and pull.ff configuration values—and what they mean for you as a developer—in a future post. If you suffer raging anxiety from casual mentions of the word rebase, go with the default strategy for now:

$ git config --global pull.rebase false

And finally, since Git version 2.28, it’s also necessary to set a default branch name for new repos created via git init. Previously, master was the default, which Git, GitHub, and the broader industry are moving away from because of its racist connotations. Git itself suggests main, trunk, or development. Set your preference on the init.defaultBranch property:

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Great. Configuration. Got it. But where does Git store those values? How can you check what values you’ve set? Let’s see how to inspect your configuration values and where Git stores them.

Inspecting Your Configuration Values

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The git config command doesn’t only set configuration values.

You can read configuration values with it, too.

To list your --global values, pass in the --list option:

$ git config --global --list
user.name=Darth Vader
user.email=vader@deathstar.example.com
init.defaultBranch=main 
pull.rebase=false

And if you like, you can add another option, --show-origin, to output the source file containing each value:

$ git config --global --list --show-origin file:/home/vader/.gitconfig user.name=Darth Vader
file:/home/vader/.gitconfig user.email=vader@deathstar.example.com
file:/home/vader/.gitconfig init.defaultBranch=main
file:/home/vader/.gitconfig pull.rebase=false

That information is a little redundant here. Later in this series, we’ll look at configuration values stored at different levels of scope: not just per user (--global), but on system and per-repository levels, too.

Summing Up

In this post, we’ve dealt with:

• Setting user.name and user.email
• Setting pull.rebase to false globally to deal with remote branches
• Setting a default branch name
• Inspecting your configuration values

In the next post, we’ll look at why your config output might not be output directly on the command line, as in the examples above, and what you can do about it.

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