I'm in a bit of a bind with Git. I'm trying to execute git commit but I need to be able to swtich between ~/.gitconfig1 and ~/.gitconfig2 Is there a command line switch - or anyway to have Git use a different gitconfig file then the ones found at /etc/gitconfig, ~/.gitconfig and .git/config?
5 Answers
I found a way to execute this - it wasn't elegant but it did work - and so far seems to be the only way to get this to work.
Git uses the HOME path to determine where .gitconfig is. I was able to perform something like this:
/home/marco/.silly/.gitconfig /home/marco/.stupid/.gitconfig /home/marco/.gitconfig And when executing Git Commit (which is the only command that requires the .gitconfig) I override the home path.
HOME=/home/marco/.silly/ git commit -m "silly configuration" You can then use alias to do this easily
alias sillygit="HOME=/home/marco/.silly/ git" sillygit commit -m "silly stuff" 2 Comments
Cascabel
Nice hack. I can't seem to find any real way to do this - there's a GIT_CONFIG environment variable, but it only affects
git config itself, in the same way as its -f,--file option.
alper
For the git version 2.35.2 and above first user have to apply:
env HOME=/home/marco/.silly git config --global --add safe.directory <repo-path>Mario Ceppi's alias approach can be used in a slightly more elegant way using the -c config=value argument to git:
$ alias sillygit="git -c user.name=Silly -c [email protected]" $ sillygit commit This of course assumes you don't mind keeping the differing config keys in your .bashrc or the like instead of in your .gitconfig, and it has the caveat of breaking shell completion.
Comments
@amirouche's comment and Emil Lundberg's answer can be combined to actually load another Git config file:
alias git="git -c 'include.path=/some/path/to/my/custom/.gitconfig'" However, the user's ~/.gitconfig file is still loaded. This approach only overwrites settings from the other git config files.
Comments
If you only need to use one .gitconfig file in each workspace, instead of having to switch between configs while working in one workspace, then includeIf may suffice, as it can be used to load custom configurations depending on workspace path elements or remote urls: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#_conditional_includes
Comments
You can use --git-dir
git --git-dir /home/marco/silly/.git commit ... 
1 Comment
Dan Hulme
--git-dir sets the repository being edited, which the questioner is specifically trying to avoid.
git commit-v2(or something shorter) to!export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Second name"; git commit.includeIf, see git-scm.com/docs/git-config