Monthly Archives: January 2016

Tips and Tricks: Intermediate Git configuration

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There are several ‘levels’ at which you can configure git. The three I know about are:

  • repository-level
  • repository branch-level
  • global

They are slightly self explanatory.

  • repository branch-level means that the configurations/aliases are applied ONLY to a specific branch in that repository. I haven’t had a need to use this one yet, so I can’t tell you a ton about it.
  • repository-level means that the configurations/aliases are applied ONLY to that repository, but to all branches on that repository. This can be configured to use different email addresses to different projects (ex: work email vs personal email), among other things.
  • global means that the configurations/aliases are applied to ALL git repositories on your system.

So, how do we set this up?

From the command line

Most of the tutorials on how to set up aliases give the command line version.

In your git repository, you can type git config XXX (where XXX is filler for whatever configuration you want to set). To set the configurations globally, you can type git config --global XXX. Adding the --global flag sets it for all git repositories. Some examples:

git config --global user.name "Clare Glinka"
– This sets my name as “Clare Glinka” for all repos.

git config --global user.email myemail@example.com
– This sets my email as myemail@example.com for all repos.

git config merge.ff false
– disables fast-forward merges by default at the repository level. Fast-forward merging will be disabled for all branches in that repo. Adding the --global flag will disable fast-forward merging for ALL repos.

You can check out other configuration settings in the Git documentation on customizing your git configuration and the git-config manual page.

Now that we’ve set some configs, how do we look at them? (because nothing is real till we see the output, right?)

git config --list will list all the configuration settings for your current directory/branch, including things like your remotes.

git config --list --global will list all the configurations settings for your system. For me, this is a much shorter list, since it does not include things like remotes.

Edit .gitconfig

There is another way to set configurations that I find a little easier to look at sometimes. That is checking out the .gitconfig file. For your global settings, .gitconfig lives in your ~ directory, and you can open it up and edit it with your favorite text editor. You can check out your repository-level configuration file by looking at REPO/.git/config.

References

First-Time Git Setup
Customizing Git Configuration
git-config Manual Page
StackOverflow: Can I make fast forwarding be off by default in git?
Git Tip: git config user name and email for local (not global) config

“In the context of the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) we define a responsibility to be “a reason for change.” If you can think of more than one motive for changing a class, then that class has more than one responsibility.”

— Bob Martin, The Principles of OOD

“A class should do the smallest possible useful thing; that is, it should have a single responsibility.”

— Sandi Metz, Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby

Saving dotfiles with symlinks on OSX

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I’ve always been impressed with folks who have their dotfiles all backed up to git somewhere, and I’ve finally worked out how to do it myself. The magic answer is symlinks!

STEP 1: DOTFILES

So, dotfiles are basically ‘hidden’ files that contain information about settings you don’t want to keep setting every time you try to do something. Lots of programs use dotfiles to keep track of user-specific configurations. For example. in ~/.gitconfig, Git stores information like your username and user email (and much, MUCH more).

STEP 2: Collect dotfiles into a Git repo

Mostly, dotfiles live in your home directory. But, you don’t really want to put everything in your home directory under git’s watchful eye, so the easier step is to collect all the dotfiles into a git repo that lives elsewhere. Pick a folder, ANY FOLDER! For best experience, I suspect it should live somewhere under your home directory. I’m currently keeping mine in ~/code/dotfiles.

Dotfiles you might want to keep under version control:
– Git config (~/.gitconfig)
– terminal config (~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc)
– basically anything were you’ve set prefs that are stored!

Hint The First

In order for the next step to work, you can’t have an existing copy of your dotfiles in your home directory. So if you want to put your .gitconfig under version control, for example, it is better to MOVE it instead of COPYING it.

Hint The Second

The ultimate point of this whole exercise (for me) was to have all my dotfiles backed up somewhere. If (like me) you are not yet ready to publicly publish your dotfiles on Github, there are a number of other Git-based services that will provide private repos for free.

STEP 3: Symlink!

The ln command is used to create links in your (unix-based) system. Use the --help command to get more info on the myriad of options available to you. Just using the ln command creates something called a ‘hard link’, which is not what we want. We want a ‘symbolic’ link instead. The syntax is ln -s + actual location of the file + name and location you want to see that file under.

Example:

ln -s ~/code/dotfiles/gitconfig ~/.gitconfig

will result in the gitconfig in the dotfiles directory to be accessible from the ~/.gitconfig location, which is where Git is expecting to see all the Git preferences you’ve set.

STEP 4: PROFIT!

RESOURCES:

I stumbled across this great article called How to Create and Use Symlinks on a Mac that made the lightbulb go off and instigated this whole song and dance.