Hierarchical git config

Question

On my personal machine I have set my personal email address in my global git config.

$ git config --global --get user.email
[email protected]

However, I also have my company's code checked out, and as such, I need to configure git with my company's email address.

$ cd corp/project
$ git config --local --get user.email
[email protected]

Sometimes, however, when cloning a repo I forget to override my email address, and so I commit using my personal email address.

It would be possible to remove my global git config, thereby preventing me from committing in any repo before setting user.email in the local git config.

This is a bit of a pita though, and in an ideal world I would be able to set a hierarchical git config so that repos under a certain subdirectory (or some other means of working out which config applies) use the most specific setting therein.

Something like the following:

~/
|
+--- .gitconfig               # sets personal email address
|
+--- src/
     |
     +--- project/            # ~/.gitconfig email address applies 
     |    
     +--- corp/
          |
          +--- .git/config    # sets corp email address
          |
          +--- project/       # corp/.git/config email address applies

AFAIK currently this isn't natively possible with git, it would require a new level of config which sits between global and local

Is there a way for me to achieve what I'm looking for here?

Answer 1

It is not supported yet, however as of git 2.8 (Mar '16) you can disable global user config as follows:

git config --global user.useConfigOnly true

That way git will never let you commit until you set an email in your local config. You can think of a script to fetch your global settings and copy to local config for a quick solution though.

Answer 2

Checkout out this great post on git hooks by Orr Sella, specifically for e-mail use. He completely foregoes a global config, and uses a hook to prevent a clone with no config available:

EMAIL=$(git config user.email)
if [ -z "$EMAIL" ]; then
    # user.email is empty
    echo "ERROR: [pre-commit hook] Aborting commit because user.email is missing. Configure user.email for this repository by running: '$ git config user.email [email protected]'. Make sure not to configure globally and use the correct email."
    exit 1
else
    # user.email is not empty
    exit 0
fi

The way to use this is in the post. You could refine this to look for a local config in the repository root, check for e-mail (using grep even) and if it doesn't exists use the global. Something like

EMAIL = $(grep user.email $GIT_DIR/config)
if [[ $? ]]; then 
    EMAIL = $(git config user.email)
    exit 0
fi
EMAIL = $(EMAIL##*user.email* )

GIT_DIR is guaranteed to be the repository root when the hook runs.

Answer 3

AFAIK git itself does not support more than per-repo and global identity.

I archived similar stuff by using a cd hook in zsh:

# ~/.zshrc
# call this function after cd-ing into a directory
__zsh-on-cd () {
if git ls-files &>/dev/null ; then
    if [[ "$PWD" =~ 'Company' ]]; then
        echo "setting git to use company identity"
        git config user.name "John Doe"
        git config user.email "[email protected]"
    else
        echo "setting git to use personal identity"
        git config user.name "johndoes"
        git config user.email "[email protected]"
    fi
fi
}

chpwd_functions=(${chpwd_functions[@]} "__zsh-on-cd")