How to Check If a Git Configuration Is Set Globally

Introduction

In this lab, you will learn how to check your Git configuration settings, specifically focusing on global configurations. You will begin by listing all your global Git settings using git config --global --list to understand the default configurations for your name, email, and default branch.

Following that, you will explore how to check the value of a specific global configuration setting, such as your username or email, using git config --global <setting_name>. Finally, you will compare global and local Git configurations to understand the difference in their scope and how they affect your Git projects.

Skills Graph

Run git config --global --list

In this step, we'll start exploring how Git is configured on your system. Git uses configuration files to store settings like your name, email, and preferred text editor. These settings can be applied globally (to all your Git projects) or locally (to a specific project).

We'll begin by looking at your global configuration. This is where settings that apply to all your Git repositories are stored.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

git config --global --list

This command tells Git to list all the settings in your global configuration file.

You should see output similar to this:

user.name=Jane Doe
[email protected]
init.defaultBranch=master

This output shows the global settings that were configured automatically when your lab environment was set up.

• user.name: This is the name that will be associated with your commits.
• user.email: This is the email address that will be associated with your commits.
• init.defaultBranch: This sets the default name for the initial branch when you create a new repository.

Understanding your Git configuration is important because it affects how your commits are recorded and how Git behaves in general. The --global flag ensures that these settings apply to all your repositories on this system.

In the next step, we'll look at how to check specific configuration settings.

Check Specific Config with git config

In the previous step, we listed all the global Git configuration settings. Now, let's learn how to check the value of a specific setting. This is useful when you only want to know the value of one particular configuration item, like your username or email.

You can check a specific configuration value by providing the setting name to the git config command, along with the --global flag.

For example, to check your configured username, run:

git config --global user.name

You should see the username that was configured in the setup:

Jane Doe

Similarly, to check your configured email address, run:

git config --global user.email

This will output your email:

[email protected]

And to check the default branch name for new repositories:

git config --global init.defaultBranch

This will show:

master

Using git config --global <setting> is a quick way to retrieve the value of a specific global configuration setting without listing everything. This command is helpful for verifying that a particular setting is configured correctly.

In the next step, we will explore the difference between global and local Git configurations.

Compare Global vs Local Config

Git has different levels of configuration. We've already seen the --global configuration, which applies to all your repositories. There's also a --local configuration, which applies only to the specific repository you are currently in. Local configurations override global configurations for that particular repository.

To see the local configuration for a repository, you need to be inside a Git repository and run git config --local --list. Since we haven't created a new repository in this lab yet, running this command now will result in an error.

Let's first create a new directory and initialize a Git repository inside it, just like you did in the "Your First Git Lab":

mkdir my-local-repo
cd my-local-repo
git init

You should see the initialization message:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/labex/project/my-local-repo/.git/

Now that you are inside the my-local-repo directory, which is a Git repository, you can check its local configuration:

git config --local --list

You will likely see no output, or very minimal output, because no local configurations have been set yet for this specific repository.

Now, let's set a local configuration that is different from the global one. For example, let's set a different user.name for this specific repository:

git config --local user.name "Local User"

This command sets the user.name specifically for the my-local-repo.

Now, list the local configuration again:

git config --local --list

You should now see the local user.name:

user.name=Local User

Finally, let's see what happens when you ask for the user.name without specifying --global or --local. Git will look for the configuration in this order: local, global, and then system. The first one it finds will be used.

Run this command while still inside my-local-repo:

git config user.name

You should see the local user name, because the local configuration overrides the global one:

Local User

Now, navigate back to the ~/project directory (outside of the my-local-repo):

cd ~/project

And run the same command again:

git config user.name

This time, since you are not inside a repository with a local configuration, Git will use the global configuration:

Jane Doe

This demonstrates how local configurations take precedence over global configurations, allowing you to have specific settings for individual projects while maintaining general settings for all others.

Summary

In this lab, we learned how to check Git configuration settings. We started by using git config --global --list to view all global configuration settings, such as user.name, user.email, and init.defaultBranch, understanding their purpose and how the --global flag makes them apply to all repositories.

We then explored how to check the value of a specific global configuration setting using git config --global <setting_name>, which is useful for quickly retrieving individual configuration values like the username or email address.