Configuring Git to automatically select personal or job configurations

Making per-repository git configurations for personal and job repositories is a bit annoying so here is a simple approach for automatically applying different Git configurations to different repositories.

First, you need to keep your personal and job repositories under different directories. In my case I do the following:

~/Projects
├── job
└── personal

After that, you need to separate your configurations which is easy thanks to Git includeIf feature. In the first-level config (~/.config/git/config or ~/.gitconfig) I store settings that should be applied regardless of whether it is a personal or a job project (e.g. settings like core.editor, etc) and the default configuration with my personal email and PGP key.

Then I create separate configuration files for non-default configurations (I put everything under ~/.config/git or $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git):

• job.gitconfig - this is the config to be used for my main job.

  [user] name = John Doe email = john.doe@company.com signingkey = AAAAAAAA

Then I include this file in the main config file (~/.config/git/config):

[user]
	name = John Doe
	email = john.doe@example.com
	signingkey = DEADBEEF

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Projects/job/"]
	path = "job.gitconfig"

This way appropriate configurations will be applied for projects under personal (and everything else other than job) or job subdirectories.

[UPD 2022-02-12]: Now I use separate files only for job directories related configurations and use the default configuration for everything else putting it into the top-level file.