Git Folder Identities

Sometimes you want a different git configuration in different contexts. For example you might want different author information, or to exclude files for only some kinds of projects, or to have a specific template for certain kinds of projects.

The easiest way to do this consistently is with a includeIf statement. For example to have custom options for any git repository under a folder called apache add this to the bottom of your ~/.gitconfig.

[includeIf "gitdir:apache/]
    path = .gitconfig_apache

Then put any custom configuration options in ~/.gitconfig_apache. Then if you have a git folder in ~/src/apache/code/my-repo then any configuration in ~/.gitconfig_apache will be applied, but it won’t by if you’re in ~/src/random/my-repo (since apache/ is not in the path to the repository root).

If you just want the configuration to apply to a few specific repositories you can add local configuration in each repository in .git/config. Between these two methods you should be able to get the context dependent configuration you want.

The details of git configuration

Configuration is obtained by reading through various config files in order from top to bottom, where later assignments overwrite previous; so for example a variable in a local configuration will overwrite a variable in a global configuation.

system configuration:    $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig
global configuration:    ~/.gitconfig
local configuration:     (repo)/.git/config
Environment variables
Command line

I’m skipping over some details including worktree configuration, but this captures most of it. One other handy thing to know is the local configuration can also be specified to be a different file with the GIT_CONFIG environment variable or the -f/--file command line argument.

This gives you plenty of ways to set your configuration; especially when you combine this with includeIf (and the unconditional include) which inserts the referenced configuration file at that point based on the location of the gitdir or the name of a branch with onbranch.

You could actually implement the includeIf behaviour by setting environment variables based on your working directory, but that’s a bit flaky and won’t work if you use some tool outside the shell you configured it in. The includeIf method is pretty common and seems to work well.

The gitdir (and onbranch) in includeIf uses a gitignore style syntax so you could even do funky things like gitdir:~/src/**/apache/*/.git to get any repositories under ~/src one folder below an apache directory. I don’t know why you would, but you certainly could.

One final gotcha; gitdir only works if you’re in a git directory. So you can sort-of think of gitdir:apache/ as equivalent to gitdir:**/apache/**/.git, and the configuration won’t apply in ~/src/apache/ if that’s not a git directory. It rarely comes up, but can be confusing when debugging.