Setting Identity

After installing git you will have to configure it on your computer. The most important configuration variables are username and email. Username is configuration variable that git will use to associate you with every commit that you make locally and when you push those commits to GitHub repository from the command line Email is configuration variable that git uses to associate all commits that you push to the remote repository with your GitHub account. Git also offers a way to set different email addresses for commits that you push from the command line and for commits and other operations that you make from GitHub. On the other hand, if you don't want your email to be visible on every commit that you make you can use no-reply email address that git provides.

Follow below commands to setup your git username and email:

$ git config --global user.name "Your name here"

$ git config --global user.email "Your email address here"

--global - by using this option you are setting username and user email variables globally on your system (you are changing ~/.gitconfig file), which means that values for those variables will be used for all of the repositories on our system.

There is --local option as well, you can use it to set your configuration variables for the specific repository.

If you want to check your git configurations use the following command:

$ git config --list

If you're not completely new to git and you're already familiar with git push the following configuration can be useful:

$ git config --global push.default current

With this configuration you will change the default behavior of git push and you will be able to push the current branch to the remote one with using only git push command without specifying origin <branch-name>.

If you don't like master as a name of the default branch, new git version 2.28 comes with a new configuration variable to change the name of the default branch

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch <default-branch-name>

With this configuration you can set the default branch name for newly-created git repositories.