Changing Your Git Username and Email

When Git is installed the first thing you probably want to do is set up your username and email. That is unless of course git blame always seems to out you for breaking the build!

My preferred route is to simple use the git config command. Basically, all the command is really doing is editing the .gitconfig file off of your root directory. You can edit that file directly, but I tend to find the command a little easier.

View your .gitconfig file

Here are a couple methods to view what you currently have set up in your .gitconfig.

First, here's how we show our info via the config command

git config user.name

Change your username

Here is the command to change your username.

git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Change your email

Here is the command to change your email.

git config --global user.email youremail@foo.com

How .gitconfig ends up looking

So this is the final product. If you cat your ~/.gitconfig file you'll get something like this. Also, if you want to skip the commands you can manually edit and save the file to look like the output below.

[user]
name = Your Name  
email = youremail@foo.com