Configure git

Git configuration comes in three categories: personal preference, good idea, and essential for life.

Introduce yourself: Name, contact info, and favorite text editor

This is essential for life.

Git keeps global configuration in .gitconfig in your home directory. Don’t edit this file directly. Instead use the configuration commands in git. Show and modify configuration with git config. The --global makes the configuration apply to all your repositories. Without that, settings are local to the repo (and stored in .git/.gitconfig.)

1. Everybody must do these two things, or git will complain on every commit that it doesn’t know who you are:

    git config --global user.name "John Doe"
    git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

1. You’d best choose your editor and set it. Otherwise you might be thrown into vi, and that’s just cruel.

    git config --global core.editor textedit

Change `textedit` to your editor of choice. The GIT_EDITOR environment variable, if set, will override this. > This editor is launched whenever git wants you to create or edit a commit message, or for an interactive rebase. That is, pretty much all day. If you don't have a usable editor configured here, then you can't make a commit unless you supply the commit message with -m.

Good Ideas

1. Git is more fun with colours.

    git config --global color.ui auto

1. Default to “do things right” when merging. This says “When I say ‘git merge’ then merge to the code I am trying to keep in sync with”

    git config --global merge.defaulttoupstream true

1. Default to “do things right” when pushing. This says “When I say ‘git push’ then push the branch I’m on, and nothing else”

    git config --global push.default simple

Personal Preference

If you have an editor that creates temp files, or maybe a Mac with its infernal .DS_Store, you can list those in a file somewhere and then tell git to read that file and exclude everything you listed.

git config --clobal core.excludesfile $HOME/.gitexcludes