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Multiple Git Accounts on One Computer

Multiple Git Accounts on One Computer

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Cristiana Man
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2 min read

You might need to use multiple Git accounts on a single computer. For example, you might have personal, work, and university accounts.

Most Git tutorials show you how to configure your global username and email which will be used when you make commits. Typically you set this right after installing Git and is your default user name and email.

git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOUR EMAIL"

Setting User per Git Repository

You can set a custom user name and email for a specific Git repository by running this in the root of your Git repository:

git config user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config user.email "YOUR EMAIL"

Setting User per Git Commit

In some cases, you might want to set a user name for a specific commit. You can configure a user name and email as part of the git commit command.

git -c "user.name=YOUR NAME" -c "user.email=YOUR EMAIL" commit -m"COMMIT MESSAGE"

Setting User per Folder

I found an interesting solution on Stack Overflow for setting custom user names and emails based on which folder your Git repository is in on your computer.

You need to update the global ~/.gitconfig file. This file is specific to each user and is also the file where your global user and email are stored. Typically, on a Windows machine, this file is located at the root of your user folder (e.g. C:\Users\CristianaMan\.gitconfig). If you are unsure where this file is, you can run:

git config --list --show-origin

This command will show a list of all the configured Git properties and the corresponding file location.

Once you identified the file, notice it contains the following:

[user]
    name = YOUR NAME
    email = YOUR EMAIL

You can replace the user configuration with a snippet like the one in the example below which uses conditional includes. In this example, we would clone all personal repositories under a folder called personal and all work repositories under a folder called work.

In .gitconfig file:

[includeIf "gitdir:~/personal/"]
    path = .gitconfig-personal
[includeIf "gitdir:~/work/"]
    path = .gitconfig-work

Note: On Windows you might need to add the whole path (e.g. [includeIf "gitdir:C:/Users/CristianaMan/Documents/personal"])

Create a .gitconfig-personal file in the same folder as your .gitconfig file and add

[user]
    name = YOUR NAME
    email = YOUR PERSONAL EMAIL

Create a .gitconfig-work file and add

[user]
    name = YOUR NAME
    email = YOUR WORK EMAIL

You can check if your user name and email are set correctly by cloning a project in the personal folder and in the root of that repository running git config --list --show-origin.

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