Multiple git profiles without manually switching the config

We often need to maintain multiple git client. For myself I use Github for my personal work and bitbucket for job. In a single device it's a bit painful to maintain if you don't create separate user account for personal and job works.

I used to override the local .git/config for my personal projects while leaving the --global config for bitbucket.

But today I'll share a trick that will help you to handle this situation automatically! In order to do this your git version must be above 2.13. Let's check that first.

git -v

My git version is 2.38.1. So this trick will work for me. You can continue following this guide if your git version is larger than 2.13.

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Let's say you follow this file structure for your projects

~/
-- Personal/
---- Project A
---- Project B
-- Work/
---- Project A
---- Project B

If you separately store you personal and work repositories then you are already a step ahead! If not then start by doing this first.

Once you have separated you repositories, let's look at the git config file:

cat ~/.gitconfig

It may look like this if don't have anything but name and email

[user]
    name = user_name
    email = [e-mail]

Let's create two new files for personal and work profiles:

touch ~/.gitconfig_personal

touch ~/.gitconfig_work

and open them in your favorite text editor. In my case VS Code.

code ~/.gitconfig_personal

Now copy the content of ~/.gitconfig and modify as needed. After that save the file. Do same for the other config file.

Once done, let's open the ~/.gitconfig file in VS Code and add necessary changes to the files.

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Personal/"]
  path = .gitconfig_personal
[includeIf "gitdir:~/Work/"]
  path = .gitconfig_work

Above code will allow you to conditionally include configs based on the directory.

You still will be able to override this using git config for specific repository.