Github user per project scope

How to use a different Github-user for different projects

Different Github-user per project

If you want to use a different Github-user depending on the project you’re currently working on, the changes required are quite small and quickly applied. The main requirement to define a Github-user in project-scope is to correctly define the config-file in the .git-directory.

Updating the config file

This can be done either manually by directly modifying the file or by using the git-CLI. In the following example, I’ll show you how to use the CLI. Note that every project that uses git as its version management tool has such a directory as well as the config-file. What exactly it does is out of scope of this article, so let’s focus on the scoped user-config for now.

Before running the commands, please make sure you're in the root of the project.

// Note: the quotation marks have to be included!

git config --local user.name "user-name"
git config --local user.email "[email protected]"

The “--local”-flag makes the difference

The main difference when setting both username as well as email is to use the “--local”-flag. This will update the “config” in the hidden .git-directory.

On macOS, you can use the Keyboard-shortcut "Shift" + "Command" + "period". On Windows, simply select the checkbox to show all files in the Explorer.

// Example of some of the contents of the 'config'-file
// after running the above commands.
//
// The snippet below only shows a slice of a given
// config file and focus on the relevant changes.

[core]
	repositoryformatversion = 0
	filemode = true
[user]
	name = user-name
	email = [email protected]

// As you can see, "[user]" got added to the file.
// This now informs git regarding the user in
// this local clone of the repo.

Conclusion

And we’ve already reached the end of this article. As you can see, using a different user for each project is really only a small change required, but helps you avoiding to switch accounts every time you switch projects.

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