Preventing unwanted git email leaking
Hold on Cowboy
This blog post is pretty old. Be careful with the information you find in here. It's likely dead, dying, or wildly inaccurate.
Maybe you work on different git projects, on business, then at home for personal projects. In the past, as a convenience, I set my ~/.gitconfig
to include my name and email like the following.
[user]
name = "Shane A. Stillwell"
email = "[email protected]"
This is exactly what git wants you to do when it detects you haven’t set your name or email
*** 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.
So what’s the big deal?
Now when you are working on a projects for work, or different clients, it will use the global name / email, but shoot, you didn’t mean to make that commit with your personal email, it was supposed to be your work email. Bummer, it’s now a permanent part of git log.
The solution
Very simple. Open up your ~/.gitconfig
and change your email to none. (I assume your name doesn’t change between projects)
[user]
name = "Shane A. Stillwell"
email = "(none)"
Now in each project, before you can commit you’ll be prompted like above, just remember NOT to use the --global
flag, e.g. git config user.email "[email protected]"
. Now each git repo will have a correctly set email address and you’re less likely to leak personal emails into business projects.
Did this help you out? It took me a few days to piece together all this information together, I hope this saves you some time (who knows, maybe the future me will be thankful I wrote this down). Let me know your thoughts. [email protected]