Why do my GitHub commits always show as unknown author?

Question

I've just set up a GitHub account and pushed an initial repository. If I look at the account level, under "Public Activity" it's correct and says chriskessel pushed .....

If I click on the repository though, it says: unknown authored 4 minutes ago

I can't figure out how to configure IntelliJ (or whatever underlying Git file) to get my name in the actual commit line. git config user.name at the command line in the project knows who I am correctly.

I'm using IntelliJ 11, Git 1.7.9, and Windows 7.

I'm rather puzzled, especially since the GitHub account knows who did things, but not the GitHub repository and all my commits and even the repository creation were through IntelliJ. Any ideas what to look at?

Answer 1

Double check your user.email setting.
Both user.name and user.email must be set for GitHub to pick up the right Author.

As an example, see the "Git author Unknown" question.
See also the blog post "GitHub: Committing code to your public repository without "Unknown" author name in commits".

From the GitHub man page:

Git tracks who makes each commit by checking the user’s name and email.
In addition, we use this info to associate your commits with your GitHub account.
To set these, enter the code below, replacing the name and email with your own. The name should be your actual name, not your GitHub username.

$ git config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname"
$ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"