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Show HN: Switch Git Users CLI

by geongeorgek on 11/12/20, 12:59 PM with 57 comments

by varl on 11/12/20, 2:35 PM

I found this user management strategy somewhere, and it's been working great for me:

  git config --global --unset user.name
  git config --global --unset user.email
  git config --global --unset user.signingkey

  git config --global user.useConfigOnly true

  git config --global user.<id>.name "<name>"
  git config --global user.<id>.email "<email>"

  git config --global alias.identity '! git config user.name "$(git config user.$1.name)"; git config user.email "$(git config user.$1.email)"; :'

So given that I have created two users, e.g. personal and work I run:

  git identity work

in repos that need the work name/e-mail, and

  git identity personal

in the ones that are private.

by pavlo on 11/12/20, 1:55 PM
This is a great looking tool.
What I have been doing by hand for some time is putting code for different customers in different directories and having a conditional in `~/.gitconfig` to determine what config applies there:
```
    [includeIf "gitdir:~/projects-private/**"]
      path = ./.gitconfig-private

    [includeIf "gitdir:~/projects-client/**"]
      path = ./.gitconfig-work
```
Then in .gitconfig-private or .gitconfig-work I have all the usual gitconfig settings that apply, for example the [user] section...
Switching to the right directory thus automatically changes the settings.
by Foxboron on 11/12/20, 1:50 PM
A 1000 line YARN lock file for something that would be roughly 20 lines of bash is amazing and terrifying at the same time.

by oefrha on 11/12/20, 2:03 PM

Without using include in gitconfig:

  #!/usr/bin/env zsh
  case $1 in
  foo)
      git config user.name 'John Doe'
      git config user.email john@example.com
      git config user.signingKey 0xFFFFFFFF
      ;;
  bar)
      git config user.name 'Jane Doe'
      git config user.email jane@example.com
      git config user.signingKey 0xEEEEEEEE
      ;;
  baz)
      git config user.name 'My Dog'
      git config user.email dog@example.com
      git config user.signingKey 0xDDDDDDDD
      ;;
  *)
      echo "usage: git-user foo|bar|baz" >&2
      exit 1
      ;;
  esac

Done.

Btw probably want to add signingKey support.

by archseer on 11/12/20, 1:54 PM
git has a similar feature built in: https://deepsource.io/blog/managing-different-git-profiles/
by mr-karan on 11/12/20, 4:59 PM
I currently use [karn](https://github.com/prydonius/karn) to manage multiple `git` identities. Works pretty nice.
by gurjeet on 11/14/20, 6:59 AM
I rely on Git's `user.useConfigOnly` option to force myself to set my email per repository. This is what my `user` section in ~/.gitconfig looks like.
```
  [user]
    name = Gurjeet Singh
    # Tell Git to _not_ guess my name and email based on `whoami` and `hostname`
    useConfigOnly = true
```
With this in place, whenever I try to commit for the first time in a repository, Git prompts me
```
  *** Please tell me who you are.*
```
I then add an email address to the repo-local config based on whether it's work or personal project.
```
  git config user.email me@example.com
```
by miguelmota on 11/12/20, 5:37 PM
This package installed 47.4MiB of node_modules. Yikes.
by enriquto on 11/12/20, 2:24 PM
What's the point of writing this simple tool in js? I'd like to use it but I don't have npm everywhere (and I don't want to grab a huge tree of dependencies just for editing a couple of lines on a text file...)
by 29athrowaway on 11/12/20, 7:29 PM
You can have a per-project git config, which to me is a more convenient solution.
For my work repo I configure the repo to use my work identity. For my personal repos I use my personal identity.
I do not need to switch identities when using the same repo.
Doing this, you only setup your identity once per repo not every time, which is safer/less error prone. i.e.: you wont leak your work email on github by accident.
by KuiN on 11/12/20, 3:58 PM
Have seen more than a few attempts to solve this problem. Here's my version[0] and there's many more on GitHub. Wonder if there's an opportunity to unify our efforts & get something into git contrib?
[0] - https://github.com/bobbo/git-profile
by SparkyMcUnicorn on 11/12/20, 3:36 PM
This line makes it not very useful, because I have to re-add accounts for each project.
```
    const store = require("data-store")({ path: process.cwd() + "/data.json" });
```
I think a `git-user-data.json` file in a centralized location makes far more sense.
by geongeorgek on 11/12/20, 1:01 PM
Author here! I'm a freelancer working for multiple agencies at the moment. And One of the requirements was that I use the agency email for all commits.
So I made this as a sugar for git config user.email whatever@gmail.com
by zachrip on 11/12/20, 2:03 PM
Looks neat, but I agree with others about using conditional includes instead. Perhaps this tool could build on that?
by Icyphox on 11/12/20, 2:06 PM
Could've been written in a 30–40 line shell script, heh.