"Sharing Git credentials with your container" doesn't work

Question

What I did

1. set the git config globally.

(local) $ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
(local) $ git config --global user.name "Your Name"

2. Remote-Container: rebuild Container

3. Git commit

(Remote-Container) $ git commit -m hogehoge

Result

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only in this repository.

fatal: unable to auto-detect email address (got 'root@aaaaaaaaaaa.(none)')

Ref

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers#_sharing-git-credentials-with-your-container

Answer 1

I had a similar issue because I was running git config --global in postCreateCommand. I wanted to change the diff and merge tools in the container. However, my username and password disappeared from my .gitconfig. I did not understand the cause yet, but I solved the issue by adding my commands to the postAttachCommand instead.

So, in the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json, instead of:

{
  ...
  postCreateCommand": "git config --global diff.tool ...",
  ...
}

I use:

{
  ...
  postAttachCommand": "git config --global diff.tool ...",
  ...
}

I am wondering if your situation is not related. It should be useful to know your .devcontainer/devcontainer.json. Still, I hope this information is useful for other users with similar problems.

Answer 2

For me I was using WSL2 on Windows with devcontainers and found that it doesn't copy .gitconf from windows but from the base Linux distro so I had to add the settings there.

So in WSL terminal I did :

  git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Then these settings were shared with the devcontainer.