Is it possible to switch the user on a git repo?

Question

We have a staging server that we use git to manage very simply: develop locally, git commit/push, and then git pull on the server. I'd love to be able to switch user on the server's copy so I could run the git pull rather than the person who set up the environment. Any idea if this is possible?

Answer 1

Just chown -R (or chgrp -R and chmod -R g+w) the repository you want to be able to git pull into. Git has no permission checking of its own, it defers that to whichever access mechanism you use. In case of local and SSH access, as you’re apparently using, that’s just regular OS file ownership.

Answer 2

There is a great repo on github called gitswitch which will allow you to switch between git users: https://github.com/joealba/gitswitch

From the readme:

Easily set/switch your current git user info for a git repo .git/config or your global ~/.gitconfig file.

This gem should come in handy if you have work and personal repositories. It also might help with switching between users while pair programming.

Would you rather type “git config user.email ‘[email protected]’”, etc. or type “gitswitch switch work”? If you answered the latter, check out this gem.