Setup Git Configs

Configure Git with your personal information and preferences, including your name, email, and default text editor settings to prepare for version control workflows.

This tutorial modifies content from Jenna Jordan’s Intro to Git & GitHub (Speedrun edition), which draws from the Software Carpentry Version Control with Git lesson, the Carpentries Incubator Version Control with Git lesson, and the Library Carpentry Introduction to Git lesson. Copyright (c) The Carpentries. The original material is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Changes made: Content has been modified and expanded by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) to include IPA-specific examples.

NoteLearning Objectives
  • Set up basic configs for Git

Setting up Git

When we use Git on a new computer for the first time, we need to configure a few things. Some basic configurations to set for Git are:

  • your name
  • your email address,
  • your preferred text editor

To start we will check in on our current Git configuration. Open your shell terminal window and type:

git config --list
TipExample Output

On MacOS, without any configuration your output might look like this:

credential.helper=osxkeychain

On Windows, without any configuration your output might look like this:

diff.astextplain.textconv=astextplain
filter.lfs.clean=git-lfs clean -- %f
filter.lfs.smudge=git-lfs smudge -- %f
filter.lfs.process=git-lfs filter-process
filter.lfs.required=true
http.sslbackend=openssl
http.sslcainfo=C:/Program Files/Git/mingw64/ssl/certs/ca-bundle.crt
core.autocrlf=true
core.fscache=true
core.symlinks=false
pull.rebase=false
credential.helper=manager-core
credential.https://dev.azure.com.usehttppath=true
init.defaultbranch=main

If you have different output, then you may have your Git configured already. If you have not configured Git, we will do that together now.

First, we will tell Git our user name and email.

Please note: You need to use the same email address in your Git configuration in the shell as you entered into GitHub when you created your GitHub account. Later in the lesson we will be using GitHub and the email addresses need to match. If you are concerned about privacy, please review GitHub’s instructions for keeping your email address private.

Type these two commands into your shell, using your own name and email:

git config --global user.name "Loki Odinson"
git config --global user.email "loki.odinson@tva.org"

If you enter the commands correctly, the shell will merely return a command prompt and no messages. To check your work, ask Git what your configuration is using the same command as above:

Let’s also set our default text editor. A text editor is necessary with some of your Git work, and the default from Git is Vim, which is a text editor that is hard to learn at first. Since we are using VS Code for this lesson, we will set the default editor to code. You can feel free to change this at a later time.

git config --global core.editor "code --wait"
git config --list
user.name=Loki Odinson
user.email=loki.odinson@tva.org
core.editor=code --wait
WarningLine Endings

As with other keys, when you hit the ‘return’ key on your keyboard, your computer encodes this input. For reasons that are long to explain, different operating systems use different characters to represent the end of a line. (You may also hear these referred to as newlines or line breaks.) Because git uses these characters to compare files, it may cause unexpected issues when editing a file on different machines.

You can change the way git recognizes and encodes line endings using the core.autocrlf command to git config. The following settings are recommended:

On OS X and Linux:

git config --global core.autocrlf input

And on Windows:

git config --global core.autocrlf true

You can read more about this issue on this GitHub page.

NoteDefault Git branch naming 
git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Source file changes are associated with a “branch.” By default, Git will create a branch called master when you create a new repository with git init. This term evokes the racist practice of human slavery and the software development community has moved to adopt more inclusive language.

In 2020, most Git code hosting services transitioned to using main as the default branch. As an example, any new repository that is opened in GitHub and GitLab default to main. However, Git has not yet made the same change. As a result, local repositories must be manually configured have the same main branch name as most cloud services.

For versions of Git prior to 2.28, the change can be made on an individual repository level. Note that if this value is unset in your local Git configuration, the init.defaultBranch value defaults to master.

Since we are creating the repository on GitHub, the default branch name for the multiverse repo will be main. Configure this setting if you plan on creating git repositories locally first.

Key Points

  • Version control helps track changes to files and projects
  • Git and GitHub are not the same
  • Git commands are written as git verb options
  • When we use Git on a new computer for the first time, we need to configure a few things
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