How to Check If a Git User Email Is Configured

Introduction

In this lab, you will learn how to check your configured Git user email address. We will explore how Git stores and retrieves this information, understanding the difference between global and local configurations.

You will run commands to display your current email setting, explicitly check global configurations, and see how Git behaves when no email is set. This hands-on experience will help you understand how Git attributes commits and how to manage your identity in different repositories.

Skills Graph

Run git config user.email

In this step, we'll explore how Git stores your email address. Git uses your email address to identify you in the commit history. This is important for tracking who made which changes, especially when collaborating with others.

We previously configured a global email address in the setup section. Let's see how Git retrieves this information.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

git config user.email

You should see the email address that was configured globally:

[email protected]

This command tells Git to display the value of the user.email configuration setting. When you run git config without specifying --global or --local, Git checks for the configuration in a specific order: first local (repository-specific), then global (user-specific), and finally system-wide. Since we only have a global configuration set up so far, it shows the global value.

Understanding how Git stores and retrieves configuration settings like your email is crucial for customizing your Git environment and ensuring your commits are correctly attributed to you.

Check Global vs Local Email Config

In this step, we'll explore the difference between global and local Git configurations, specifically for the user.email setting.

Git allows you to configure settings at different levels:

• System level: Applies to all users on the system.
• Global level: Applies to a specific user on the system (this is what we configured in the setup).
• Local level: Applies only to the current Git repository.

Local configurations override global configurations, and global configurations override system configurations.

Let's first explicitly check the global email configuration using the --global flag:

git config --global user.email

You should see the same email address as before:

[email protected]

Now, let's try setting a local email address specifically for the my-time-machine repository we created in the previous lab. Make sure you are still inside the ~/project/my-time-machine directory.

cd ~/project/my-time-machine
git config user.email "[email protected]"

This command sets the user.email for only the current repository (my-time-machine). Notice we didn't use the --global flag this time.

Now, let's check the user.email again without any flags while still in the my-time-machine directory:

git config user.email

What do you see?

[email protected]

It shows the local email address! This demonstrates that the local configuration takes precedence over the global configuration within this specific repository.

If you were to navigate outside of the my-time-machine directory and run git config user.email again, it would show the global email address because there is no local configuration outside of that repository.

This ability to set local configurations is very useful. For example, you might use your personal email for personal projects (global config) but your work email for projects related to your job (local config within those work project repositories).

Test with Unset Email

In this step, we'll see what happens when Git doesn't have a user.email configured at the local level, but does have one at the global level. This reinforces the concept of configuration precedence.

First, let's make sure we are in the my-time-machine directory:

cd ~/project/my-time-machine

Now, we will unset the local user.email configuration using the --unset flag:

git config --unset user.email

This command removes the user.email setting specifically from the local repository configuration. It won't affect the global configuration.

Let's verify that the local configuration is gone by trying to retrieve it:

git config --local user.email

You should see an error message indicating that the configuration key is not found at the local level:

error: key 'user.email' not found

Now, let's check the user.email again without any flags while still in the my-time-machine directory:

git config user.email

What do you expect to see? Since the local configuration is unset, Git should fall back to the global configuration.

[email protected]

As expected, it now shows the global email address again! This confirms that when a local configuration is not present, Git uses the global configuration.

This step demonstrates the hierarchy of Git configurations. Git looks for settings at the local level first. If it doesn't find them there, it looks at the global level, and then the system level. This allows for flexible configuration depending on your needs for different projects.

Summary

In this lab, we learned how to check the configured Git user email address using the git config user.email command. We explored how Git retrieves this information, prioritizing local, then global, and finally system configurations. We also explicitly checked the global email configuration using the --global flag, understanding the difference between global and local configuration levels and their precedence.