First Setup

Now that you have Git on your system, you’ll want to do a few things to customize your Git environment. You should have to do these things only once on any given computer; they’ll stick around between upgrades. You can also change them at any time by running through the commands again.

Git comes with a tool called git config that lets you get and set configuration variables that control all aspects of how Git looks and operates. These variables can be stored in three different places:

1. [path]/etc/gitconfig file: Contains values applied to every user on the system and all their repositories. If you pass the option --system to git config, it reads and writes from this file specifically. Because this is a system configuration file, you would need administrative or superuser privilege to make changes to it.

2. ~/.gitconfig or ~/.config/git/config file: Values specific personally to you, the user. You can make Git read and write to this file specifically by passing the --global option, and this affects all of the repositories you work with on your system.

3. config file in the Git directory (that is, .git/config) of whatever repository you’re currently using: Specific to that single repository. You can force Git to read from and write to this file with the --local option, but that is in fact the default. Unsurprisingly, you need to be located somewhere in a Git repository for this option to work properly.

Each level overrides values in the previous level, so values in .git/config trump those in [path]/etc/gitconfig.

On Windows systems, Git looks for the .gitconfig file in the $HOME directory (C:\Users$USER for most people).

It also still looks for [path]/etc/gitconfig, although it’s relative to the MSys root, which is wherever you decide to install Git on your Windows system when you run the installer.

If you are using version 2.x or later of Git for Windows, there is also a system-level config file at "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Git\config" on Windows XP, and in "C:\ProgramData\Git\config" on Windows Vista and newer. This config file can only be changed by git config -f as an admin.

You can view all of your settings and where they are coming from using:

$ git config --list --show-origin