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Arnold Ho
Arnold Ho

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Why is my GitHub contribution not showing and how to fix it?

Recently I started contributing to an open source project, I have probably made 20+ commits on that project by now and a lot of the pull requests that I have made got merged in the end.

But one thing I realised is that I wasn't showing up as a contributor of that project on the GitHub repo!

Surprised pikachu

If you ever find yourself in the situation, it can get super annoying since you have put in all the blood sweat and tears into the project and now your contribution is ignored.

Angry Pikachu

^this is precisely how I felt, so I did a bunch of angry googling on the issue. And I realised that the problem is the following:

My local git user email is different to my GitHub user email!

It appears that this is by far the most common reason why you are not showing up as an open source contributor even after your pull request got merged. Because GitHub doesn't recognise that it is you, my@emailaddress.com (your GitHub email) if you used myother@emailaddress.org instead to make your commit on your local git.

To change that, either add your email to your GitHub account in your GitHub settings, or change your local git email address by typing in the following in your command line:

git config --global user.email = "My@emailadress.com"
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To check what email address you are currently using for your local git, you can type in the following command within one of your git repository:

cat .git/config
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Another way to check is by typing:

git log
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which gives you a more detailed version of all your commits and the corresponding email address for each one of them.

Now that you have aligned your local git email and your GitHub email, you will finally get your well deserved recognition for your open source contribution!

This would hopefully make you one heck of a happy pikachu!
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I hope this helps! This is just one of the reasons why you are not showing up as an open source contributor, if this doesn't work, you might have to find the coder's best friend for extra help.

As always, happy coding!

Top comments (2)

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pandademic profile image
Pandademic • Edited

Thanks! Always wondered why this happend!

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_arnoldho profile image
Arnold Ho

Glad it helped!