In some cases, we work between our personal projects and work projects, so we need to use different user across multiple projects. As we all known, git provides a way to set up user individually in the .git/config file in the project root dir. But actually, I always forget to set up the user in the new project before I commit my changes. This annoyed me for a long time.

So I found a way to auto toggle the user in git. We can use the [includeIf] to include different config files in the ~/.gitconfig file. This is a feature named “conditional includes” in git.

The following is my ~/.gitconfig file:

[user]
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Work/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig.work
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Personal/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig.personal

And the following is my ~/.gitconfig.work file:

[user]
    name = work
    email = work@company.com

And the following is my ~/.gitconfig.personal file:

[user]
    name = personal
    email = personal@me.com

The [includeIf] will include the config file in the path if the gitdir matches the current project root dir. In the ~/Work dir my commit user will be work, and in the ~/Personal dir my commit user will be personal. So we can use different user in different projects. But remember remove the [user] section in the .git/config file in the project root dir, because it have higher priority.

It’s very useful for me. Hope it can help you too.