Git

git-config last updated in 2.34.1

NAME

git-config - Get and set repository or global options

SYNOPSIS

git config [<file-option>] [type] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] name [value [value_regex]]
git config [<file-option>] [type] --add name value
git config [<file-option>] [type] --replace-all name value [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] [type] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] --get name [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] [type] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] --get-all name [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] [type] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] [--name-only] --get-regexp name_regex [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] [type] [-z|--null] --get-urlmatch name URL
git config [<file-option>] --unset name [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] --unset-all name [value_regex]
git config [<file-option>] --rename-section old_name new_name
git config [<file-option>] --remove-section name
git config [<file-option>] [--show-origin] [-z|--null] [--name-only] -l | --list
git config [<file-option>] --get-color name [default]
git config [<file-option>] --get-colorbool name [stdout-is-tty]
git config [<file-option>] -e | --edit

DESCRIPTION

You can query/set/replace/unset options with this command. The name is actually the section and the key separated by a dot, and the value will be escaped.

Multiple lines can be added to an option by using the --add option. If you want to update or unset an option which can occur on multiple lines, a POSIX regexp value_regex needs to be given. Only the existing values that match the regexp are updated or unset. If you want to handle the lines that do not match the regex, just prepend a single exclamation mark in front (see also EXAMPLES).

The type specifier can be either --int or --bool, to make git config ensure that the variable(s) are of the given type and convert the value to the canonical form (simple decimal number for int, a "true" or "false" string for bool), or --path, which does some path expansion (see --path below). If no type specifier is passed, no checks or transformations are performed on the value.

When reading, the values are read from the system, global and repository local configuration files by default, and options --system, --global, --local and --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to read from only that location (see FILES).

When writing, the new value is written to the repository local configuration file by default, and options --system, --global, --file <filename> can be used to tell the command to write to that location (you can say --local but that is the default).

This command will fail with non-zero status upon error. Some exit codes are:

The section or key is invalid (ret=1),
no section or name was provided (ret=2),
the config file is invalid (ret=3),
the config file cannot be written (ret=4),
you try to unset an option which does not exist (ret=5),
you try to unset/set an option for which multiple lines match (ret=5), or
you try to use an invalid regexp (ret=6).

On success, the command returns the exit code 0.

OPTIONS

--replace-all: Default behavior is to replace at most one line. This replaces all lines matching the key (and optionally the value_regex).
--add: Adds a new line to the option without altering any existing values. This is the same as providing ^$ as the value_regex in --replace-all.
--get: Get the value for a given key (optionally filtered by a regex matching the value). Returns error code 1 if the key was not found and the last value if multiple key values were found.
--get-all: Like get, but returns all values for a multi-valued key.
--get-regexp: Like --get-all, but interprets the name as a regular expression and writes out the key names. Regular expression matching is currently case-sensitive and done against a canonicalized version of the key in which section and variable names are lowercased, but subsection names are not.
--get-urlmatch name URL: When given a two-part name section.key, the value for section.<url>.key whose <url> part matches the best to the given URL is returned (if no such key exists, the value for section.key is used as a fallback). When given just the section as name, do so for all the keys in the section and list them. Returns error code 1 if no value is found.
--global: For writing options: write to global ~/.gitconfig file rather than the repository .git/config, write to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config file if this file exists and the ~/.gitconfig file doesn’t.

For reading options: read only from global ~/.gitconfig and from $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config rather than from all available files.

See also FILES.
--system: For writing options: write to system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig rather than the repository .git/config.

For reading options: read only from system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig rather than from all available files.

See also FILES.
--local: For writing options: write to the repository .git/config file. This is the default behavior.

For reading options: read only from the repository .git/config rather than from all available files.

See also FILES.
-f config-file
--file config-file: Use the given config file instead of the one specified by GIT_CONFIG.
--blob blob: Similar to --file but use the given blob instead of a file. E.g. you can use master:.gitmodules to read values from the file .gitmodules in the master branch. See "SPECIFYING REVISIONS" section in gitrevisions[7] for a more complete list of ways to spell blob names.
--remove-section: Remove the given section from the configuration file.
--rename-section: Rename the given section to a new name.
--unset: Remove the line matching the key from config file.
--unset-all: Remove all lines matching the key from config file.
-l
--list: List all variables set in config file, along with their values.
--bool: git config will ensure that the output is "true" or "false"
--int: git config will ensure that the output is a simple decimal number. An optional value suffix of k, m, or g in the config file will cause the value to be multiplied by 1024, 1048576, or 1073741824 prior to output.
--bool-or-int: git config will ensure that the output matches the format of either --bool or --int, as described above.
--path: git-config will expand leading ~ to the value of $HOME, and ~user to the home directory for the specified user. This option has no effect when setting the value (but you can use git config bla ~/ from the command line to let your shell do the expansion).
-z
--null: For all options that output values and/or keys, always end values with the null character (instead of a newline). Use newline instead as a delimiter between key and value. This allows for secure parsing of the output without getting confused e.g. by values that contain line breaks.
--name-only: Output only the names of config variables for --list or --get-regexp.
--show-origin: Augment the output of all queried config options with the origin type (file, standard input, blob, command line) and the actual origin (config file path, ref, or blob id if applicable).
--get-colorbool name [stdout-is-tty]: Find the color setting for name (e.g. color.diff) and output "true" or "false". stdout-is-tty should be either "true" or "false", and is taken into account when configuration says "auto". If stdout-is-tty is missing, then checks the standard output of the command itself, and exits with status 0 if color is to be used, or exits with status 1 otherwise. When the color setting for name is undefined, the command uses color.ui as fallback.
--get-color name [default]: Find the color configured for name (e.g. color.diff.new) and output it as the ANSI color escape sequence to the standard output. The optional default parameter is used instead, if there is no color configured for name.
-e
--edit: Opens an editor to modify the specified config file; either --system, --global, or repository (default).
--[no-]includes: Respect include.* directives in config files when looking up values. Defaults to off when a specific file is given (e.g., using --file, --global, etc) and on when searching all config files.

FILES

If not set explicitly with --file, there are four files where git config will search for configuration options:

$(prefix)/etc/gitconfig: System-wide configuration file.
$XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/config: Second user-specific configuration file. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/config will be used. Any single-valued variable set in this file will be overwritten by whatever is in ~/.gitconfig. It is a good idea not to create this file if you sometimes use older versions of Git, as support for this file was added fairly recently.
~/.gitconfig: User-specific configuration file. Also called "global" configuration file.
$GIT_DIR/config: Repository specific configuration file.

If no further options are given, all reading options will read all of these files that are available. If the global or the system-wide configuration file are not available they will be ignored. If the repository configuration file is not available or readable, git config will exit with a non-zero error code. However, in neither case will an error message be issued.

The files are read in the order given above, with last value found taking precedence over values read earlier. When multiple values are taken then all values of a key from all files will be used.

You may override individual configuration parameters when running any git command by using the -c option. See git[1] for details.

All writing options will per default write to the repository specific configuration file. Note that this also affects options like --replace-all and --unset. git config will only ever change one file at a time.

You can override these rules either by command-line options or by environment variables. The --global and the --system options will limit the file used to the global or system-wide file respectively. The GIT_CONFIG environment variable has a similar effect, but you can specify any filename you want.

ENVIRONMENT

GIT_CONFIG: Take the configuration from the given file instead of .git/config. Using the "--global" option forces this to ~/.gitconfig. Using the "--system" option forces this to $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig.
GIT_CONFIG_NOSYSTEM: Whether to skip reading settings from the system-wide $(prefix)/etc/gitconfig file. See git[1] for details.

EXAMPLES

Given a .git/config like this:

#
# This is the config file, and
# a '#' or ';' character indicates
# a comment
#

; core variables
[core]
	; Don't trust file modes
	filemode = false

; Our diff algorithm
[diff]
	external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
	renames = true

; Proxy settings
[core]
	gitproxy=proxy-command for kernel.org
	gitproxy=default-proxy ; for all the rest

; HTTP
[http]
	sslVerify
[http "https://weak.example.com"]
	sslVerify = false
	cookieFile = /tmp/cookie.txt

you can set the filemode to true with

% git config core.filemode true

The hypothetical proxy command entries actually have a postfix to discern what URL they apply to. Here is how to change the entry for kernel.org to "ssh".

% git config core.gitproxy '"ssh" for kernel.org' 'for kernel.org$'

This makes sure that only the key/value pair for kernel.org is replaced.

To delete the entry for renames, do

% git config --unset diff.renames

If you want to delete an entry for a multivar (like core.gitproxy above), you have to provide a regex matching the value of exactly one line.

To query the value for a given key, do

% git config --get core.filemode

% git config core.filemode

or, to query a multivar:

% git config --get core.gitproxy "for kernel.org$"

If you want to know all the values for a multivar, do:

% git config --get-all core.gitproxy

If you like to live dangerously, you can replace all core.gitproxy by a new one with

% git config --replace-all core.gitproxy ssh

However, if you really only want to replace the line for the default proxy, i.e. the one without a "for …" postfix, do something like this:

% git config core.gitproxy ssh '! for '

To actually match only values with an exclamation mark, you have to

% git config section.key value '[!]'

To add a new proxy, without altering any of the existing ones, use

% git config --add core.gitproxy '"proxy-command" for example.com'

An example to use customized color from the configuration in your script:

#!/bin/sh
WS=$(git config --get-color color.diff.whitespace "blue reverse")
RESET=$(git config --get-color "" "reset")
echo "${WS}your whitespace color or blue reverse${RESET}"

For URLs in https://weak.example.com, http.sslVerify is set to false, while it is set to true for all others:

% git config --bool --get-urlmatch http.sslverify https://good.example.com
true
% git config --bool --get-urlmatch http.sslverify https://weak.example.com
false
% git config --get-urlmatch http https://weak.example.com
http.cookieFile /tmp/cookie.txt
http.sslverify false

CONFIGURATION FILE

The Git configuration file contains a number of variables that affect the Git commands' behavior. The .git/config file in each repository is used to store the configuration for that repository, and $HOME/.gitconfig is used to store a per-user configuration as fallback values for the .git/config file. The file /etc/gitconfig can be used to store a system-wide default configuration.

The configuration variables are used by both the Git plumbing and the porcelains. The variables are divided into sections, wherein the fully qualified variable name of the variable itself is the last dot-separated segment and the section name is everything before the last dot. The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character. Some variables may appear multiple times; we say then that the variable is multivalued.

Syntax

The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive; whitespaces are mostly ignored. The # and ; characters begin comments to the end of line, blank lines are ignored.

The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins. Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, - and . are allowed in section names. Each variable must belong to some section, which means that there must be a section header before the first setting of a variable.

Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header, like in the example below:

	[section "subsection"]

Subsection names are case sensitive and can contain any characters except newline (doublequote " and backslash can be included by escaping them as \" and \\, respectively). Section headers cannot span multiple lines. Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection. You can have [section] if you have [section "subsection"], but you don’t need to.

There is also a deprecated [section.subsection] syntax. With this syntax, the subsection name is converted to lower-case and is also compared case sensitively. These subsection names follow the same restrictions as section names.

All the other lines (and the remainder of the line after the section header) are recognized as setting variables, in the form name = value (or just name, which is a short-hand to say that the variable is the boolean "true"). The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character.

A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by ending it with a \; the backquote and the end-of-line are stripped. Leading whitespaces after name =, the remainder of the line after the first comment character # or ;, and trailing whitespaces of the line are discarded unless they are enclosed in double quotes. Internal whitespaces within the value are retained verbatim.

Inside double quotes, double quote " and backslash \ characters must be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

The following escape sequences (beside \" and \\) are recognized: \n for newline character (NL), \t for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB) and \b for backspace (BS). Other char escape sequences (including octal escape sequences) are invalid.

Includes

You can include one config file from another by setting the special include.path variable to the name of the file to be included. The variable takes a pathname as its value, and is subject to tilde expansion.

The included file is expanded immediately, as if its contents had been found at the location of the include directive. If the value of the include.path variable is a relative path, the path is considered to be relative to the configuration file in which the include directive was found. See below for examples.

Example

# Core variables
[core]
	; Don't trust file modes
	filemode = false

# Our diff algorithm
[diff]
	external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
	renames = true

[branch "devel"]
	remote = origin
	merge = refs/heads/devel

# Proxy settings
[core]
	gitProxy="ssh" for "kernel.org"
	gitProxy=default-proxy ; for the rest

[include]
	path = /path/to/foo.inc ; include by absolute path
	path = foo ; expand "foo" relative to the current file
	path = ~/foo ; expand "foo" in your `$HOME` directory

Values

Values of many variables are treated as a simple string, but there are variables that take values of specific types and there are rules as to how to spell them.

boolean

When a variable is said to take a boolean value, many synonyms are accepted for true and false; these are all case-insensitive.

true: Boolean true can be spelled as yes, on, true, or 1. Also, a variable defined without = <value> is taken as true.
false: Boolean false can be spelled as no, off, false, or 0.

When converting value to the canonical form using --bool type specifier; git config will ensure that the output is "true" or "false" (spelled in lowercase).

integer

The value for many variables that specify various sizes can be suffixed with k, M,… to mean "scale the number by 1024", "by 1024x1024", etc.

color

The value for a variable that takes a color is a list of colors (at most two, one for foreground and one for background) and attributes (as many as you want), separated by spaces.

The basic colors accepted are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan and white. The first color given is the foreground; the second is the background.

Colors may also be given as numbers between 0 and 255; these use ANSI 256-color mode (but note that not all terminals may support this). If your terminal supports it, you may also specify 24-bit RGB values as hex, like #ff0ab3.

The accepted attributes are bold, dim, ul, blink, reverse, italic, and strike (for crossed-out or "strikethrough" letters). The position of any attributes with respect to the colors (before, after, or in between), doesn’t matter. Specific attributes may be turned off by prefixing them with no or no- (e.g., noreverse, no-ul, etc).

An empty color string produces no color effect at all. This can be used to avoid coloring specific elements without disabling color entirely.

For git’s pre-defined color slots, the attributes are meant to be reset at the beginning of each item in the colored output. So setting color.decorate.branch to black will paint that branch name in a plain black, even if the previous thing on the same output line (e.g. opening parenthesis before the list of branch names in log --decorate output) is set to be painted with bold or some other attribute. However, custom log formats may do more complicated and layered coloring, and the negated forms may be useful there.

pathname

A variable that takes a pathname value can be given a string that begins with "~/" or "~user/", and the usual tilde expansion happens to such a string: ~/ is expanded to the value of $HOME, and ~user/ to the specified user’s home directory.

Variables

Note that this list is non-comprehensive and not necessarily complete. For command-specific variables, you will find a more detailed description in the appropriate manual page.

Other git-related tools may and do use their own variables. When inventing new variables for use in your own tool, make sure their names do not conflict with those that are used by Git itself and other popular tools, and describe them in your documentation.

advice.*

These variables control various optional help messages designed to aid new users. All advice.* variables default to true, and you can tell Git that you do not need help by setting these to false:

pushUpdateRejected: Set this variable to false if you want to disable pushNonFFCurrent, pushNonFFMatching, pushAlreadyExists, pushFetchFirst, and pushNeedsForce simultaneously.
pushNonFFCurrent: Advice shown when git-push[1] fails due to a non-fast-forward update to the current branch.
pushNonFFMatching: Advice shown when you ran git-push[1] and pushed matching refs explicitly (i.e. you used :, or specified a refspec that isn’t your current branch) and it resulted in a non-fast-forward error.
pushAlreadyExists: Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that does not qualify for fast-forwarding (e.g., a tag.)
pushFetchFirst: Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object we do not have.
pushNeedsForce: Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object that is not a commit-ish, or make the remote ref point at an object that is not a commit-ish.
statusHints: Show directions on how to proceed from the current state in the output of git-status[1], in the template shown when writing commit messages in git-commit[1], and in the help message shown by git-checkout[1] when switching branch.
statusUoption: Advise to consider using the -u option to git-status[1] when the command takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate untracked files.
commitBeforeMerge: Advice shown when git-merge[1] refuses to merge to avoid overwriting local changes.
resolveConflict: Advice shown by various commands when conflicts prevent the operation from being performed.
implicitIdentity: Advice on how to set your identity configuration when your information is guessed from the system username and domain name.
detachedHead: Advice shown when you used git-checkout[1] to move to the detach HEAD state, to instruct how to create a local branch after the fact.
amWorkDir: Advice that shows the location of the patch file when git-am[1] fails to apply it.
rmHints: In case of failure in the output of git-rm[1], show directions on how to proceed from the current state.

core.fileMode

Tells Git if the executable bit of files in the working tree is to be honored.

Some filesystems lose the executable bit when a file that is marked as executable is checked out, or checks out an non-executable file with executable bit on. git-clone[1] or git-init[1] probe the filesystem to see if it handles the executable bit correctly and this variable is automatically set as necessary.

A repository, however, may be on a filesystem that handles the filemode correctly, and this variable is set to true when created, but later may be made accessible from another environment that loses the filemode (e.g. exporting ext4 via CIFS mount, visiting a Cygwin created repository with Git for Windows or Eclipse). In such a case it may be necessary to set this variable to false. See git-update-index[1].

The default is true (when core.filemode is not specified in the config file).

core.hideDotFiles

(Windows-only) If true, mark newly-created directories and files whose name starts with a dot as hidden. If dotGitOnly, only the .git/ directory is hidden, but no other files starting with a dot. The default mode is dotGitOnly.

core.ignoreCase

If true, this option enables various workarounds to enable Git to work better on filesystems that are not case sensitive, like FAT. For example, if a directory listing finds "makefile" when Git expects "Makefile", Git will assume it is really the same file, and continue to remember it as "Makefile".

The default is false, except git-clone[1] or git-init[1] will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

core.precomposeUnicode

This option is only used by Mac OS implementation of Git. When core.precomposeUnicode=true, Git reverts the unicode decomposition of filenames done by Mac OS. This is useful when sharing a repository between Mac OS and Linux or Windows. (Git for Windows 1.7.10 or higher is needed, or Git under cygwin 1.7). When false, file names are handled fully transparent by Git, which is backward compatible with older versions of Git.

core.protectHFS

If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would be considered equivalent to .git on an HFS+ filesystem. Defaults to true on Mac OS, and false elsewhere.

core.protectNTFS

If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would cause problems with the NTFS filesystem, e.g. conflict with 8.3 "short" names. Defaults to true on Windows, and false elsewhere.

core.trustctime

If false, the ctime differences between the index and the working tree are ignored; useful when the inode change time is regularly modified by something outside Git (file system crawlers and some backup systems). See git-update-index[1]. True by default.

core.untrackedCache

Determines what to do about the untracked cache feature of the index. It will be kept, if this variable is unset or set to keep. It will automatically be added if set to true. And it will automatically be removed, if set to false. Before setting it to true, you should check that mtime is working properly on your system. See git-update-index[1]. keep by default.

core.checkStat

Determines which stat fields to match between the index and work tree. The user can set this to default or minimal. Default (or explicitly default), is to check all fields, including the sub-second part of mtime and ctime.

core.quotePath

The commands that output paths (e.g. ls-files, diff), when not given the -z option, will quote "unusual" characters in the pathname by enclosing the pathname in a double-quote pair and with backslashes the same way strings in C source code are quoted. If this variable is set to false, the bytes higher than 0x80 are not quoted but output as verbatim. Note that double quote, backslash and control characters are always quoted without -z regardless of the setting of this variable.

core.eol

Sets the line ending type to use in the working directory for files that have the text property set when core.autocrlf is false. Alternatives are lf, crlf and native, which uses the platform’s native line ending. The default value is native. See gitattributes[5] for more information on end-of-line conversion.

core.safecrlf

If true, makes Git check if converting CRLF is reversible when end-of-line conversion is active. Git will verify if a command modifies a file in the work tree either directly or indirectly. For example, committing a file followed by checking out the same file should yield the original file in the work tree. If this is not the case for the current setting of core.autocrlf, Git will reject the file. The variable can be set to "warn", in which case Git will only warn about an irreversible conversion but continue the operation.

CRLF conversion bears a slight chance of corrupting data. When it is enabled, Git will convert CRLF to LF during commit and LF to CRLF during checkout. A file that contains a mixture of LF and CRLF before the commit cannot be recreated by Git. For text files this is the right thing to do: it corrects line endings such that we have only LF line endings in the repository. But for binary files that are accidentally classified as text the conversion can corrupt data.

If you recognize such corruption early you can easily fix it by setting the conversion type explicitly in .gitattributes. Right after committing you still have the original file in your work tree and this file is not yet corrupted. You can explicitly tell Git that this file is binary and Git will handle the file appropriately.

Unfortunately, the desired effect of cleaning up text files with mixed line endings and the undesired effect of corrupting binary files cannot be distinguished. In both cases CRLFs are removed in an irreversible way. For text files this is the right thing to do because CRLFs are line endings, while for binary files converting CRLFs corrupts data.

Note, this safety check does not mean that a checkout will generate a file identical to the original file for a different setting of core.eol and core.autocrlf, but only for the current one. For example, a text file with LF would be accepted with core.eol=lf and could later be checked out with core.eol=crlf, in which case the resulting file would contain CRLF, although the original file contained LF. However, in both work trees the line endings would be consistent, that is either all LF or all CRLF, but never mixed. A file with mixed line endings would be reported by the core.safecrlf mechanism.

core.autocrlf

Setting this variable to "true" is the same as setting the text attribute to "auto" on all files and core.eol to "crlf". Set to true if you want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory and the repository has LF line endings. This variable can be set to input, in which case no output conversion is performed.

core.symlinks

If false, symbolic links are checked out as small plain files that contain the link text. git-update-index[1] and git-add[1] will not change the recorded type to regular file. Useful on filesystems like FAT that do not support symbolic links.

The default is true, except git-clone[1] or git-init[1] will probe and set core.symlinks false if appropriate when the repository is created.

core.gitProxy

A "proxy command" to execute (as command host port) instead of establishing direct connection to the remote server when using the Git protocol for fetching. If the variable value is in the "COMMAND for DOMAIN" format, the command is applied only on hostnames ending with the specified domain string. This variable may be set multiple times and is matched in the given order; the first match wins.

Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_COMMAND environment variable (which always applies universally, without the special "for" handling).

The special string none can be used as the proxy command to specify that no proxy be used for a given domain pattern. This is useful for excluding servers inside a firewall from proxy use, while defaulting to a common proxy for external domains.

core.sshCommand

If this variable is set, git fetch and git push will use the specified command instead of ssh when they need to connect to a remote system. The command is in the same form as the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable and is overridden when the environment variable is set.

core.ignoreStat

If true, Git will avoid using lstat() calls to detect if files have changed by setting the "assume-unchanged" bit for those tracked files which it has updated identically in both the index and working tree.

When files are modified outside of Git, the user will need to stage the modified files explicitly (e.g. see Examples section in git-update-index[1]). Git will not normally detect changes to those files.

This is useful on systems where lstat() calls are very slow, such as CIFS/Microsoft Windows.

False by default.

core.preferSymlinkRefs

Instead of the default "symref" format for HEAD and other symbolic reference files, use symbolic links. This is sometimes needed to work with old scripts that expect HEAD to be a symbolic link.

core.bare

If true this repository is assumed to be bare and has no working directory associated with it. If this is the case a number of commands that require a working directory will be disabled, such as git-add[1] or git-merge[1].

This setting is automatically guessed by git-clone[1] or git-init[1] when the repository was created. By default a repository that ends in "/.git" is assumed to be not bare (bare = false), while all other repositories are assumed to be bare (bare = true).

core.worktree

Set the path to the root of the working tree. If GIT_COMMON_DIR environment variable is set, core.worktree is ignored and not used for determining the root of working tree. This can be overridden by the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the --work-tree command-line option. The value can be an absolute path or relative to the path to the .git directory, which is either specified by --git-dir or GIT_DIR, or automatically discovered. If --git-dir or GIT_DIR is specified but none of --work-tree, GIT_WORK_TREE and core.worktree is specified, the current working directory is regarded as the top level of your working tree.

Note that this variable is honored even when set in a configuration file in a ".git" subdirectory of a directory and its value differs from the latter directory (e.g. "/path/to/.git/config" has core.worktree set to "/different/path"), which is most likely a misconfiguration. Running Git commands in the "/path/to" directory will still use "/different/path" as the root of the work tree and can cause confusion unless you know what you are doing (e.g. you are creating a read-only snapshot of the same index to a location different from the repository’s usual working tree).

core.logAllRefUpdates

Enable the reflog. Updates to a ref <ref> is logged to the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>", by appending the new and old SHA-1, the date/time and the reason of the update, but only when the file exists. If this configuration variable is set to true, missing "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" file is automatically created for branch heads (i.e. under refs/heads/), remote refs (i.e. under refs/remotes/), note refs (i.e. under refs/notes/), and the symbolic ref HEAD. If it is set to always, then a missing reflog is automatically created for any ref under refs/.

This information can be used to determine what commit was the tip of a branch "2 days ago".

This value is true by default in a repository that has a working directory associated with it, and false by default in a bare repository.

core.repositoryFormatVersion

Internal variable identifying the repository format and layout version.

core.sharedRepository

When group (or true), the repository is made shareable between several users in a group (making sure all the files and objects are group-writable). When all (or world or everybody), the repository will be readable by all users, additionally to being group-shareable. When umask (or false), Git will use permissions reported by umask(2). When 0xxx, where 0xxx is an octal number, files in the repository will have this mode value. 0xxx will override user’s umask value (whereas the other options will only override requested parts of the user’s umask value). Examples: 0660 will make the repo read/write-able for the owner and group, but inaccessible to others (equivalent to group unless umask is e.g. 0022). 0640 is a repository that is group-readable but not group-writable. See git-init[1]. False by default.

core.warnAmbiguousRefs

If true, Git will warn you if the ref name you passed it is ambiguous and might match multiple refs in the repository. True by default.

core.compression

An integer -1..9, indicating a default compression level. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If set, this provides a default to other compression variables, such as core.looseCompression and pack.compression.

core.looseCompression

An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects that are not in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to 1 (best speed).

core.packedGitWindowSize

Number of bytes of a pack file to map into memory in a single mapping operation. Larger window sizes may allow your system to process a smaller number of large pack files more quickly. Smaller window sizes will negatively affect performance due to increased calls to the operating system’s memory manager, but may improve performance when accessing a large number of large pack files.

Default is 1 MiB if NO_MMAP was set at compile time, otherwise 32 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 1 GiB on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.packedGitLimit

Maximum number of bytes to map simultaneously into memory from pack files. If Git needs to access more than this many bytes at once to complete an operation it will unmap existing regions to reclaim virtual address space within the process.

Default is 256 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 8 GiB on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.deltaBaseCacheLimit

Maximum number of bytes to reserve for caching base objects that may be referenced by multiple deltified objects. By storing the entire decompressed base objects in a cache Git is able to avoid unpacking and decompressing frequently used base objects multiple times.

Default is 96 MiB on all platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.bigFileThreshold

Files larger than this size are stored deflated, without attempting delta compression. Storing large files without delta compression avoids excessive memory usage, at the slight expense of increased disk usage. Additionally files larger than this size are always treated as binary.

Default is 512 MiB on all platforms. This should be reasonable for most projects as source code and other text files can still be delta compressed, but larger binary media files won’t be.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.excludesFile

Specifies the pathname to the file that contains patterns to describe paths that are not meant to be tracked, in addition to .gitignore (per-directory) and .git/info/exclude. Defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead. See gitignore[5].

core.askPass

Some commands (e.g. svn and http interfaces) that interactively ask for a password can be told to use an external program given via the value of this variable. Can be overridden by the GIT_ASKPASS environment variable. If not set, fall back to the value of the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable or, failing that, a simple password prompt. The external program shall be given a suitable prompt as command-line argument and write the password on its STDOUT.

core.attributesFile

In addition to .gitattributes (per-directory) and .git/info/attributes, Git looks into this file for attributes (see gitattributes[5]). Path expansions are made the same way as for core.excludesFile. Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/attributes. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/attributes is used instead.

core.hooksPath

By default Git will look for your hooks in the $GIT_DIR/hooks directory. Set this to different path, e.g. /etc/git/hooks, and Git will try to find your hooks in that directory, e.g. /etc/git/hooks/pre-receive instead of in $GIT_DIR/hooks/pre-receive.

The path can be either absolute or relative. A relative path is taken as relative to the directory where the hooks are run (see the "DESCRIPTION" section of githooks[5]).

This configuration variable is useful in cases where you’d like to centrally configure your Git hooks instead of configuring them on a per-repository basis, or as a more flexible and centralized alternative to having an init.templateDir where you’ve changed default hooks.

core.editor

Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages by launching an editor use the value of this variable when it is set, and the environment variable GIT_EDITOR is not set. See git-var[1].

core.commentChar

Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages consider a line that begins with this character commented, and removes them after the editor returns (default #).

If set to "auto", git-commit would select a character that is not the beginning character of any line in existing commit messages.

core.packedRefsTimeout

The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock the packed-refs file. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1 second).

sequence.editor

Text editor used by git rebase -i for editing the rebase instruction file. The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell when it is used. It can be overridden by the GIT_SEQUENCE_EDITOR environment variable. When not configured the default commit message editor is used instead.

core.pager

Text viewer for use by Git commands (e.g., less). The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell. The order of preference is the $GIT_PAGER environment variable, then core.pager configuration, then $PAGER, and then the default chosen at compile time (usually less).

When the LESS environment variable is unset, Git sets it to FRX (if LESS environment variable is set, Git does not change it at all). If you want to selectively override Git’s default setting for LESS, you can set core.pager to e.g. less -S. This will be passed to the shell by Git, which will translate the final command to LESS=FRX less -S. The environment does not set the S option but the command line does, instructing less to truncate long lines. Similarly, setting core.pager to less -+F will deactivate the F option specified by the environment from the command-line, deactivating the "quit if one screen" behavior of less. One can specifically activate some flags for particular commands: for example, setting pager.blame to less -S enables line truncation only for git blame.

Likewise, when the LV environment variable is unset, Git sets it to -c. You can override this setting by exporting LV with another value or setting core.pager to lv +c.

core.whitespace

A comma separated list of common whitespace problems to notice. git diff will use color.diff.whitespace to highlight them, and git apply --whitespace=error will consider them as errors. You can prefix - to disable any of them (e.g. -trailing-space):

blank-at-eol treats trailing whitespaces at the end of the line as an error (enabled by default).
space-before-tab treats a space character that appears immediately before a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (enabled by default).
indent-with-non-tab treats a line that is indented with space characters instead of the equivalent tabs as an error (not enabled by default).
tab-in-indent treats a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (not enabled by default).
blank-at-eof treats blank lines added at the end of file as an error (enabled by default).
trailing-space is a short-hand to cover both blank-at-eol and blank-at-eof.
cr-at-eol treats a carriage-return at the end of line as part of the line terminator, i.e. with it, trailing-space does not trigger if the character before such a carriage-return is not a whitespace (not enabled by default).
tabwidth=<n> tells how many character positions a tab occupies; this is relevant for indent-with-non-tab and when Git fixes tab-in-indent errors. The default tab width is 8. Allowed values are 1 to 63.

core.fsyncObjectFiles

This boolean will enable fsync() when writing object files.

This is a total waste of time and effort on a filesystem that orders data writes properly, but can be useful for filesystems that do not use journalling (traditional UNIX filesystems) or that only journal metadata and not file contents (OS X’s HFS+, or Linux ext3 with "data=writeback").

core.preloadIndex

Enable parallel index preload for operations like git diff

This can speed up operations like git diff and git status especially on filesystems like NFS that have weak caching semantics and thus relatively high IO latencies. When enabled, Git will do the index comparison to the filesystem data in parallel, allowing overlapping IO’s. Defaults to true.

core.createObject

You can set this to link, in which case a hardlink followed by a delete of the source are used to make sure that object creation will not overwrite existing objects.

On some file system/operating system combinations, this is unreliable. Set this config setting to rename there; However, This will remove the check that makes sure that existing object files will not get overwritten.

core.notesRef

When showing commit messages, also show notes which are stored in the given ref. The ref must be fully qualified. If the given ref does not exist, it is not an error but means that no notes should be printed.

This setting defaults to "refs/notes/commits", and it can be overridden by the GIT_NOTES_REF environment variable. See git-notes[1].

core.sparseCheckout

Enable "sparse checkout" feature. See section "Sparse checkout" in git-read-tree[1] for more information.

core.abbrev

Set the length object names are abbreviated to. If unspecified or set to "auto", an appropriate value is computed based on the approximate number of packed objects in your repository, which hopefully is enough for abbreviated object names to stay unique for some time.

add.ignoreErrors

add.ignore-errors (deprecated)

Tells git add to continue adding files when some files cannot be added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the --ignore-errors option of git-add[1]. add.ignore-errors is deprecated, as it does not follow the usual naming convention for configuration variables.

alias.*

Command aliases for the git[1] command wrapper - e.g. after defining "alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD", the invocation "git last" is equivalent to "git cat-file commit HEAD". To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing Git commands are ignored. Arguments are split by spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping is supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.

If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining "alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD", the invocation "git new" is equivalent to running the shell command "gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD". Note that shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory. GIT_PREFIX is set as returned by running git rev-parse --show-prefix from the original current directory. See git-rev-parse[1].

am.keepcr

If true, git-am will call git-mailsplit for patches in mbox format with parameter --keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit will not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving --no-keep-cr from the command line. See git-am[1], git-mailsplit[1].

am.threeWay

By default, git am will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git am to fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally (equivalent to giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to false. See git-am[1].

apply.ignoreWhitespace

When set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See git-apply[1].

apply.whitespace

Tells git apply how to handle whitespaces, in the same way as the --whitespace option. See git-apply[1].

branch.autoSetupMerge

Tells git branch and git checkout to set up new branches so that git-pull[1] will appropriately merge from the starting point branch. Note that even if this option is not set, this behavior can be chosen per-branch using the --track and --no-track options. The valid settings are: false — no automatic setup is done; true — automatic setup is done when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch; always — automatic setup is done when the starting point is either a local branch or remote-tracking branch. This option defaults to true.

branch.autoSetupRebase

When a new branch is created with git branch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see "branch.<name>.rebase"). When never, rebase is never automatically set to true. When local, rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches. When remote, rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches. When always, rebase will be set to true for all tracking branches. See "branch.autoSetupMerge" for details on how to set up a branch to track another branch. This option defaults to never.

branch.<name>.remote

When on branch <name>, it tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from/push to. The remote to push to may be overridden with remote.pushDefault (for all branches). The remote to push to, for the current branch, may be further overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote. If no remote is configured, or if you are not on any branch, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing. Additionally, . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository), see branch.<name>.merge's final note below.

branch.<name>.pushRemote

When on branch <name>, it overrides branch.<name>.remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch <name>. When you pull from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another place (e.g. your own publishing repository), you would want to set remote.pushDefault to specify the remote to push to for all branches, and use this option to override it for a specific branch.

branch.<name>.merge

Defines, together with branch.<name>.remote, the upstream branch for the given branch. It tells git fetch/git pull/git rebase which branch to merge and can also affect git push (see push.default). When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default refspec to be marked for merging in FETCH_HEAD. The value is handled like the remote part of a refspec, and must match a ref which is fetched from the remote given by "branch.<name>.remote". The merge information is used by git pull (which at first calls git fetch) to lookup the default branch for merging. Without this option, git pull defaults to merge the first refspec fetched. Specify multiple values to get an octopus merge. If you wish to setup git pull so that it merges into <name> from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch.<name>.merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch.<name>.remote.

branch.<name>.mergeOptions

Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of git-merge[1], but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported.

branch.<name>.rebase

When true, rebase the branch <name> on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when "git pull" is run. See "pull.rebase" for doing this in a non branch-specific manner.

When preserve, also pass --preserve-merges along to git rebase so that locally committed merge commits will not be flattened by running git pull.

When the value is interactive, the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see git-rebase[1] for details).

branch.<name>.description

Branch description, can be edited with git branch --edit-description. Branch description is automatically added in the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary.

browser.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified browser. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the URLs passed as arguments. (See git-web--browse[1].)

browser.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool that may be used to browse HTML help (see -w option in git-help[1]) or a working repository in gitweb (see git-instaweb[1]).

clean.requireForce

A boolean to make git-clean do nothing unless given -f, -i or -n. Defaults to true.

color.branch

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-branch[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.branch.<slot>

Use customized color for branch coloration. <slot> is one of current (the current branch), local (a local branch), remote (a remote-tracking branch in refs/remotes/), upstream (upstream tracking branch), plain (other refs).

color.diff

Whether to use ANSI escape sequences to add color to patches. If this is set to always, git-diff[1], git-log[1], and git-show[1] will use color for all patches. If it is set to true or auto, those commands will only use color when output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

This does not affect git-format-patch[1] or the git-diff-* plumbing commands. Can be overridden on the command line with the --color[=<when>] option.

color.diff.<slot>

Use customized color for diff colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the patch to use the specified color, and is one of context (context text - plain is a historical synonym), meta (metainformation), frag (hunk header), func (function in hunk header), old (removed lines), new (added lines), commit (commit headers), or whitespace (highlighting whitespace errors).

color.decorate.<slot>

Use customized color for git log --decorate output. <slot> is one of branch, remoteBranch, tag, stash or HEAD for local branches, remote-tracking branches, tags, stash and HEAD, respectively.

color.grep

When set to always, always highlight matches. When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use color only when the output is written to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.grep.<slot>

Use customized color for grep colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the line to use the specified color, and is one of

context: non-matching text in context lines (when using -A, -B, or -C)
filename: filename prefix (when not using -h)
function: function name lines (when using -p)
linenumber: line number prefix (when using -n)
match: matching text (same as setting matchContext and matchSelected)
matchContext: matching text in context lines
matchSelected: matching text in selected lines
selected: non-matching text in selected lines
separator: separators between fields on a line (:, -, and =) and between hunks (--)

color.interactive

When set to always, always use colors for interactive prompts and displays (such as those used by "git-add --interactive" and "git-clean --interactive"). When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use colors only when the output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.interactive.<slot>

Use customized color for git add --interactive and git clean --interactive output. <slot> may be prompt, header, help or error, for four distinct types of normal output from interactive commands.

color.pager

A boolean to enable/disable colored output when the pager is in use (default is true).

color.showBranch

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-show-branch[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.status

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-status[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.status.<slot>

Use customized color for status colorization. <slot> is one of header (the header text of the status message), added or updated (files which are added but not committed), changed (files which are changed but not added in the index), untracked (files which are not tracked by Git), branch (the current branch), nobranch (the color the no branch warning is shown in, defaulting to red), or unmerged (files which have unmerged changes).

color.ui

This variable determines the default value for variables such as color.diff and color.grep that control the use of color per command family. Its scope will expand as more commands learn configuration to set a default for the --color option. Set it to false or never if you prefer Git commands not to use color unless enabled explicitly with some other configuration or the --color option. Set it to always if you want all output not intended for machine consumption to use color, to true or auto (this is the default since Git 1.8.4) if you want such output to use color when written to the terminal.

column.ui

Specify whether supported commands should output in columns. This variable consists of a list of tokens separated by spaces or commas:

These options control when the feature should be enabled (defaults to never):

always: always show in columns
never: never show in columns
auto: show in columns if the output is to the terminal

These options control layout (defaults to column). Setting any of these implies always if none of always, never, or auto are specified.

column: fill columns before rows
row: fill rows before columns
plain: show in one column

Finally, these options can be combined with a layout option (defaults to nodense):

dense: make unequal size columns to utilize more space
nodense: make equal size columns

column.branch

Specify whether to output branch listing in git branch in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.clean

Specify the layout when list items in git clean -i, which always shows files and directories in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.status

Specify whether to output untracked files in git status in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.tag

Specify whether to output tag listing in git tag in columns. See column.ui for details.

commit.cleanup

This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. See git-commit[1] for details. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with comment character # in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with # in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).

commit.gpgSign

A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.

commit.status

A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.

commit.template

Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.

commit.verbose

A boolean or int to specify the level of verbose with git commit. See git-commit[1].

credential.helper

Specify an external helper to be called when a username or password credential is needed; the helper may consult external storage to avoid prompting the user for the credentials. Note that multiple helpers may be defined. See gitcredentials[7] for details.

credential.useHttpPath

When acquiring credentials, consider the "path" component of an http or https URL to be important. Defaults to false. See gitcredentials[7] for more information.

credential.username

If no username is set for a network authentication, use this username by default. See credential.<context>.* below, and gitcredentials[7].

credential.<url>.*

Any of the credential.* options above can be applied selectively to some credentials. For example "credential.https://example.com.username" would set the default username only for https connections to example.com. See gitcredentials[7] for details on how URLs are matched.

credentialCache.ignoreSIGHUP

Tell git-credential-cache—daemon to ignore SIGHUP, instead of quitting.

diff.autoRefreshIndex

When using git diff to compare with work tree files, do not consider stat-only change as changed. Instead, silently run git update-index --refresh to update the cached stat information for paths whose contents in the work tree match the contents in the index. This option defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files.

diff.dirstat

A comma separated list of --dirstat parameters specifying the default behavior of the --dirstat option to git-diff[1]` and friends. The defaults can be overridden on the command line (using --dirstat=<param1,param2,...>). The fallback defaults (when not changed by diff.dirstat) are changes,noncumulative,3. The following parameters are available:

changes: Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.
lines: Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.
files: Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.
cumulative: Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.
<limit>: An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: files,10,cumulative.

diff.statGraphWidth

Limit the width of the graph part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.

diff.context

Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the default of 3. This value is overridden by the -U option.

diff.interHunkContext

Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing the hunks that are close to each other. This value serves as the default for the --inter-hunk-context command line option.

diff.external

If this config variable is set, diff generation is not performed using the internal diff machinery, but using the given command. Can be overridden with the ‘GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF’ environment variable. The command is called with parameters as described under "git Diffs" in git[1]. Note: if you want to use an external diff program only on a subset of your files, you might want to use gitattributes[5] instead.

diff.ignoreSubmodules

Sets the default value of --ignore-submodules. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files. git checkout also honors this setting when reporting uncommitted changes. Setting it to all disables the submodule summary normally shown by git commit and git status when status.submoduleSummary is set unless it is overridden by using the --ignore-submodules command-line option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting.

diff.mnemonicPrefix

If set, git diff uses a prefix pair that is different from the standard "a/" and "b/" depending on what is being compared. When this configuration is in effect, reverse diff output also swaps the order of the prefixes:

git diff: compares the (i)ndex and the (w)ork tree;
git diff HEAD: compares a (c)ommit and the (w)ork tree;
git diff --cached: compares a (c)ommit and the (i)ndex;
git diff HEAD:file1 file2: compares an (o)bject and a (w)ork tree entity;
git diff --no-index a b: compares two non-git things (1) and (2).

diff.noprefix

If set, git diff does not show any source or destination prefix.

diff.orderFile

File indicating how to order files within a diff. See the -O option to git-diff[1] for details. If diff.orderFile is a relative pathname, it is treated as relative to the top of the working tree.

diff.renameLimit

The number of files to consider when performing the copy/rename detection; equivalent to the git diff option -l.

diff.renames

Whether and how Git detects renames. If set to "false", rename detection is disabled. If set to "true", basic rename detection is enabled. If set to "copies" or "copy", Git will detect copies, as well. Defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain like git-diff[1] and git-log[1], and not lower level commands such as git-diff-files[1].

diff.suppressBlankEmpty

A boolean to inhibit the standard behavior of printing a space before each empty output line. Defaults to false.

diff.submodule

Specify the format in which differences in submodules are shown. The "short" format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. The "log" format lists the commits in the range like git-submodule[1] summary does. The "diff" format shows an inline diff of the changed contents of the submodule. Defaults to "short".

diff.wordRegex

A POSIX Extended Regular Expression used to determine what is a "word" when performing word-by-word difference calculations. Character sequences that match the regular expression are "words", all other characters are ignorable whitespace.

diff.<driver>.command

The custom diff driver command. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.xfuncname

The regular expression that the diff driver should use to recognize the hunk header. A built-in pattern may also be used. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.binary

Set this option to true to make the diff driver treat files as binary. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.textconv

The command that the diff driver should call to generate the text-converted version of a file. The result of the conversion is used to generate a human-readable diff. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.wordRegex

The regular expression that the diff driver should use to split words in a line. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.cachetextconv

Set this option to true to make the diff driver cache the text conversion outputs. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.tool

Controls which diff tool is used by git-difftool[1]. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.tool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
bc
bc3
codecompare
deltawalker
diffmerge
diffuse
ecmerge
emerge
examdiff
gvimdiff
gvimdiff2
gvimdiff3
kdiff3
kompare
meld
opendiff
p4merge
tkdiff
vimdiff
vimdiff2
vimdiff3
winmerge
xxdiff

diff.indentHeuristic

Set this option to true to enable experimental heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.

diff.algorithm

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default, myers: The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.
minimal: Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.
patience: Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.
histogram: This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

diff.wsErrorHighlight

A comma separated list of old, new, context, that specifies how whitespace errors on lines are highlighted with color.diff.whitespace. Can be overridden by the command line option --ws-error-highlight=<kind>

difftool.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH.

difftool.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified diff tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image.

difftool.prompt

Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.

fastimport.unpackLimit

If the number of objects imported by git-fast-import[1] is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of imported objects equals or exceeds this limit then the pack will be stored as a pack. Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

fetch.recurseSubmodules

This option can be either set to a boolean value or to on-demand. Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to unconditionally recurse into submodules when set to true or to not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand (the default value), fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule’s reference.

fetch.fsckObjects

If it is set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched objects. It will abort in the case of a malformed object or a broken link. The result of an abort are only dangling objects. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.

fetch.unpackLimit

If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

fetch.prune

If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune.

fetch.output

Control how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full and compact. Default value is full. See section OUTPUT in git-fetch[1] for detail.

format.attach

Enable multipart/mixed attachments as the default for format-patch. The value can also be a double quoted string which will enable attachments as the default and set the value as the boundary. See the --attach option in git-format-patch[1].

format.from

Provides the default value for the --from option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a name and email address. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-from, using commit authors directly in the "From:" field of patch mails. If true, format-patch defaults to --from, using your committer identity in the "From:" field of patch mails and including a "From:" field in the body of the patch mail if different. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch uses that value instead of your committer identity. Defaults to false.

format.numbered

A boolean which can enable or disable sequence numbers in patch subjects. It defaults to "auto" which enables it only if there is more than one patch. It can be enabled or disabled for all messages by setting it to "true" or "false". See --numbered option in git-format-patch[1].

format.headers

Additional email headers to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See git-format-patch[1].

format.to

format.cc

Additional recipients to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See the --to and --cc options in git-format-patch[1].

format.subjectPrefix

The default for format-patch is to output files with the [PATCH] subject prefix. Use this variable to change that prefix.

format.signature

The default for format-patch is to output a signature containing the Git version number. Use this variable to change that default. Set this variable to the empty string ("") to suppress signature generation.

format.signatureFile

Works just like format.signature except the contents of the file specified by this variable will be used as the signature.

format.suffix

The default for format-patch is to output files with the suffix .patch. Use this variable to change that suffix (make sure to include the dot if you want it).

format.pretty

The default pretty format for log/show/whatchanged command, See git-log[1], git-show[1], git-whatchanged[1].

format.thread

The default threading style for git format-patch. Can be a boolean value, or shallow or deep. shallow threading makes every mail a reply to the head of the series, where the head is chosen from the cover letter, the --in-reply-to, and the first patch mail, in this order. deep threading makes every mail a reply to the previous one. A true boolean value is the same as shallow, and a false value disables threading.

format.signOff

A boolean value which lets you enable the -s/--signoff option of format-patch by default. Note: Adding the Signed-off-by: line to a patch should be a conscious act and means that you certify you have the rights to submit this work under the same open source license. Please see the SubmittingPatches document for further discussion.

format.coverLetter

A boolean that controls whether to generate a cover-letter when format-patch is invoked, but in addition can be set to "auto", to generate a cover-letter only when there’s more than one patch.

format.outputDirectory

Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the current working directory.

format.useAutoBase

A boolean value which lets you enable the --base=auto option of format-patch by default.

filter.<driver>.clean

The command which is used to convert the content of a worktree file to a blob upon checkin. See gitattributes[5] for details.

filter.<driver>.smudge

The command which is used to convert the content of a blob object to a worktree file upon checkout. See gitattributes[5] for details.

fsck.<msg-id>

Allows overriding the message type (error, warn or ignore) of a specific message ID such as missingEmail.

For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.

This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories which cannot be repaired without disruptive changes.

fsck.skipList

The path to a sorted list of object names (i.e. one SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should be ignored. This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this setting.

gc.aggressiveDepth

The depth parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 50.

gc.aggressiveWindow

The window size parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 250.

gc.auto

When there are approximately more than this many loose objects in the repository, git gc --auto will pack them. Some Porcelain commands use this command to perform a light-weight garbage collection from time to time. The default value is 6700. Setting this to 0 disables it.

gc.autoPackLimit

When there are more than this many packs that are not marked with *.keep file in the repository, git gc --auto consolidates them into one larger pack. The default value is 50. Setting this to 0 disables it.

gc.autoDetach

Make git gc --auto return immediately and run in background if the system supports it. Default is true.

gc.logExpiry

If the file gc.log exists, then git gc --auto won’t run unless that file is more than gc.logExpiry old. Default is "1.day". See gc.pruneExpire for more ways to specify its value.

gc.packRefs

Running git pack-refs in a repository renders it unclonable by Git versions prior to 1.5.1.2 over dumb transports such as HTTP. This variable determines whether git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set to notbare to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. The default is true.

gc.pruneExpire

When git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago. Override the grace period with this config variable. The value "now" may be used to disable this grace period and always prune unreachable objects immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. This feature helps prevent corruption when git gc runs concurrently with another process writing to the repository; see the "NOTES" section of git-gc[1].

gc.worktreePruneExpire

When git gc is run, it calls git worktree prune --expire 3.months.ago. This config variable can be used to set a different grace period. The value "now" may be used to disable the grace period and prune $GIT_DIR/worktrees immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning.

gc.reflogExpire

gc.<pattern>.reflogExpire

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

gc.reflogExpireUnreachable

gc.<pattern>.reflogExpireUnreachable

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

gc.rerereResolved

Records of conflicted merge you resolved earlier are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. The default is 60 days. See git-rerere[1].

gc.rerereUnresolved

Records of conflicted merge you have not resolved are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. The default is 15 days. See git-rerere[1].

gitcvs.commitMsgAnnotation

Append this string to each commit message. Set to empty string to disable this feature. Defaults to "via git-CVS emulator".

gitcvs.enabled

Whether the CVS server interface is enabled for this repository. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.logFile

Path to a log file where the CVS server interface well… logs various stuff. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.usecrlfattr

If true, the server will look up the end-of-line conversion attributes for files to determine the -k modes to use. If the attributes force Git to treat a file as text, the -k mode will be left blank so CVS clients will treat it as text. If they suppress text conversion, the file will be set with -kb mode, which suppresses any newline munging the client might otherwise do. If the attributes do not allow the file type to be determined, then gitcvs.allBinary is used. See gitattributes[5].

gitcvs.allBinary

This is used if gitcvs.usecrlfattr does not resolve the correct -kb mode to use. If true, all unresolved files are sent to the client in mode -kb. This causes the client to treat them as binary files, which suppresses any newline munging it otherwise might do. Alternatively, if it is set to "guess", then the contents of the file are examined to decide if it is binary, similar to core.autocrlf.

gitcvs.dbName

Database used by git-cvsserver to cache revision information derived from the Git repository. The exact meaning depends on the used database driver, for SQLite (which is the default driver) this is a filename. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details). May not contain semicolons (;). Default: %Ggitcvs.%m.sqlite

gitcvs.dbDriver

Used Perl DBI driver. You can specify any available driver for this here, but it might not work. git-cvsserver is tested with DBD::SQLite, reported to work with DBD::Pg, and reported not to work with DBD::mysql. Experimental feature. May not contain double colons (:). Default: SQLite. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.dbUser, gitcvs.dbPass

Database user and password. Only useful if setting gitcvs.dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database users and/or passwords. gitcvs.dbUser supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details).

gitcvs.dbTableNamePrefix

Database table name prefix. Prepended to the names of any database tables used, allowing a single database to be used for several repositories. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details). Any non-alphabetic characters will be replaced with underscores.

All gitcvs variables except for gitcvs.usecrlfattr and gitcvs.allBinary can also be specified as gitcvs.<access_method>.<varname> (where access_method is one of "ext" and "pserver") to make them apply only for the given access method.

gitweb.category

gitweb.description

gitweb.owner

gitweb.url

See gitweb[1] for description.

gitweb.avatar

gitweb.blame

gitweb.grep

gitweb.highlight

gitweb.patches

gitweb.pickaxe

gitweb.remote_heads

gitweb.showSizes

gitweb.snapshot

See gitweb.conf[5] for description.

grep.lineNumber

If set to true, enable -n option by default.

grep.patternType

Set the default matching behavior. Using a value of basic, extended, fixed, or perl will enable the --basic-regexp, --extended-regexp, --fixed-strings, or --perl-regexp option accordingly, while the value default will return to the default matching behavior.

grep.extendedRegexp

If set to true, enable --extended-regexp option by default. This option is ignored when the grep.patternType option is set to a value other than default.

grep.threads

Number of grep worker threads to use. See grep.threads in git-grep[1] for more information.

grep.fallbackToNoIndex

If set to true, fall back to git grep --no-index if git grep is executed outside of a git repository. Defaults to false.

gpg.program

Use this custom program instead of "gpg" found on $PATH when making or verifying a PGP signature. The program must support the same command-line interface as GPG, namely, to verify a detached signature, "gpg --verify $file - <$signature" is run, and the program is expected to signal a good signature by exiting with code 0, and to generate an ASCII-armored detached signature, the standard input of "gpg -bsau $key" is fed with the contents to be signed, and the program is expected to send the result to its standard output.

gui.commitMsgWidth

Defines how wide the commit message window is in the git-gui[1]. "75" is the default.

gui.diffContext

Specifies how many context lines should be used in calls to diff made by the git-gui[1]. The default is "5".

gui.displayUntracked

Determines if git-gui[1] shows untracked files in the file list. The default is "true".

gui.encoding

Specifies the default encoding to use for displaying of file contents in git-gui[1] and gitk[1]. It can be overridden by setting the encoding attribute for relevant files (see gitattributes[5]). If this option is not set, the tools default to the locale encoding.

gui.matchTrackingBranch

Determines if new branches created with git-gui[1] should default to tracking remote branches with matching names or not. Default: "false".

gui.newBranchTemplate

Is used as suggested name when creating new branches using the git-gui[1].

gui.pruneDuringFetch

"true" if git-gui[1] should prune remote-tracking branches when performing a fetch. The default value is "false".

gui.trustmtime

Determines if git-gui[1] should trust the file modification timestamp or not. By default the timestamps are not trusted.

gui.spellingDictionary

Specifies the dictionary used for spell checking commit messages in the git-gui[1]. When set to "none" spell checking is turned off.

gui.fastCopyBlame

If true, git gui blame uses -C instead of -C -C for original location detection. It makes blame significantly faster on huge repositories at the expense of less thorough copy detection.

gui.copyBlameThreshold

Specifies the threshold to use in git gui blame original location detection, measured in alphanumeric characters. See the git-blame[1] manual for more information on copy detection.

gui.blamehistoryctx

Specifies the radius of history context in days to show in gitk[1] for the selected commit, when the Show History Context menu item is invoked from git gui blame. If this variable is set to zero, the whole history is shown.

guitool.<name>.cmd

Specifies the shell command line to execute when the corresponding item of the git-gui[1] Tools menu is invoked. This option is mandatory for every tool. The command is executed from the root of the working directory, and in the environment it receives the name of the tool as GIT_GUITOOL, the name of the currently selected file as FILENAME, and the name of the current branch as CUR_BRANCH (if the head is detached, CUR_BRANCH is empty).

guitool.<name>.needsFile

Run the tool only if a diff is selected in the GUI. It guarantees that FILENAME is not empty.

guitool.<name>.noConsole

Run the command silently, without creating a window to display its output.

guitool.<name>.noRescan

Don’t rescan the working directory for changes after the tool finishes execution.

guitool.<name>.confirm

Show a confirmation dialog before actually running the tool.

guitool.<name>.argPrompt

Request a string argument from the user, and pass it to the tool through the ARGS environment variable. Since requesting an argument implies confirmation, the confirm option has no effect if this is enabled. If the option is set to true, yes, or 1, the dialog uses a built-in generic prompt; otherwise the exact value of the variable is used.

guitool.<name>.revPrompt

Request a single valid revision from the user, and set the REVISION environment variable. In other aspects this option is similar to argPrompt, and can be used together with it.

guitool.<name>.revUnmerged

Show only unmerged branches in the revPrompt subdialog. This is useful for tools similar to merge or rebase, but not for things like checkout or reset.

guitool.<name>.title

Specifies the title to use for the prompt dialog. The default is the tool name.

guitool.<name>.prompt

Specifies the general prompt string to display at the top of the dialog, before subsections for argPrompt and revPrompt. The default value includes the actual command.

help.browser

Specify the browser that will be used to display help in the web format. See git-help[1].

help.format

Override the default help format used by git-help[1]. Values man, info, web and html are supported. man is the default. web and html are the same.

help.autoCorrect

Automatically correct and execute mistyped commands after waiting for the given number of deciseconds (0.1 sec). If more than one command can be deduced from the entered text, nothing will be executed. If the value of this option is negative, the corrected command will be executed immediately. If the value is 0 - the command will be just shown but not executed. This is the default.

help.htmlPath

Specify the path where the HTML documentation resides. File system paths and URLs are supported. HTML pages will be prefixed with this path when help is displayed in the web format. This defaults to the documentation path of your Git installation.

http.proxy

Override the HTTP proxy, normally configured using the http_proxy, https_proxy, and all_proxy environment variables (see curl(1)). In addition to the syntax understood by curl, it is possible to specify a proxy string with a user name but no password, in which case git will attempt to acquire one in the same way it does for other credentials. See gitcredentials[7] for more information. The syntax thus is [protocol://][user[:password]@]proxyhost[:port]. This can be overridden on a per-remote basis; see remote.<name>.proxy

http.proxyAuthMethod

Set the method with which to authenticate against the HTTP proxy. This only takes effect if the configured proxy string contains a user name part (i.e. is of the form user@host or user@host:port). This can be overridden on a per-remote basis; see remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod. Both can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_PROXY_AUTHMETHOD environment variable. Possible values are:

anyauth - Automatically pick a suitable authentication method. It is assumed that the proxy answers an unauthenticated request with a 407 status code and one or more Proxy-authenticate headers with supported authentication methods. This is the default.
basic - HTTP Basic authentication
digest - HTTP Digest authentication; this prevents the password from being transmitted to the proxy in clear text
negotiate - GSS-Negotiate authentication (compare the --negotiate option of curl(1))
ntlm - NTLM authentication (compare the --ntlm option of curl(1))

http.emptyAuth

Attempt authentication without seeking a username or password. This can be used to attempt GSS-Negotiate authentication without specifying a username in the URL, as libcurl normally requires a username for authentication.

http.delegation

Control GSSAPI credential delegation. The delegation is disabled by default in libcurl since version 7.21.7. Set parameter to tell the server what it is allowed to delegate when it comes to user credentials. Used with GSS/kerberos. Possible values are:

none - Don’t allow any delegation.
policy - Delegates if and only if the OK-AS-DELEGATE flag is set in the Kerberos service ticket, which is a matter of realm policy.
always - Unconditionally allow the server to delegate.

http.extraHeader

Pass an additional HTTP header when communicating with a server. If more than one such entry exists, all of them are added as extra headers. To allow overriding the settings inherited from the system config, an empty value will reset the extra headers to the empty list.

http.cookieFile

The pathname of a file containing previously stored cookie lines, which should be used in the Git http session, if they match the server. The file format of the file to read cookies from should be plain HTTP headers or the Netscape/Mozilla cookie file format (see curl(1)). NOTE that the file specified with http.cookieFile is used only as input unless http.saveCookies is set.

http.saveCookies

If set, store cookies received during requests to the file specified by http.cookieFile. Has no effect if http.cookieFile is unset.

http.sslVersion

The SSL version to use when negotiating an SSL connection, if you want to force the default. The available and default version depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_VERSION option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this option and for the ssl version supported. Actually the possible values of this option are:

sslv2
sslv3
tlsv1
tlsv1.0
tlsv1.1
tlsv1.2

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_VERSION environment variable. To force git to use libcurl’s default ssl version and ignore any explicit http.sslversion option, set GIT_SSL_VERSION to the empty string.

http.sslCipherList

A list of SSL ciphers to use when negotiating an SSL connection. The available ciphers depend on whether libcurl was built against NSS or OpenSSL and the particular configuration of the crypto library in use. Internally this sets the CURLOPT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST option; see the libcurl documentation for more details on the format of this list.

Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST environment variable. To force git to use libcurl’s default cipher list and ignore any explicit http.sslCipherList option, set GIT_SSL_CIPHER_LIST to the empty string.

http.sslVerify

Whether to verify the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_NO_VERIFY environment variable.

http.sslCert

File containing the SSL certificate when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT environment variable.

http.sslKey

File containing the SSL private key when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_KEY environment variable.

http.sslCertPasswordProtected

Enable Git’s password prompt for the SSL certificate. Otherwise OpenSSL will prompt the user, possibly many times, if the certificate or private key is encrypted. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CERT_PASSWORD_PROTECTED environment variable.

http.sslCAInfo

File containing the certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAINFO environment variable.

http.sslCAPath

Path containing files with the CA certificates to verify the peer with when fetching or pushing over HTTPS. Can be overridden by the GIT_SSL_CAPATH environment variable.

http.pinnedpubkey

Public key of the https service. It may either be the filename of a PEM or DER encoded public key file or a string starting with sha256// followed by the base64 encoded sha256 hash of the public key. See also libcurl CURLOPT_PINNEDPUBLICKEY. git will exit with an error if this option is set but not supported by cURL.

http.sslTry

Attempt to use AUTH SSL/TLS and encrypted data transfers when connecting via regular FTP protocol. This might be needed if the FTP server requires it for security reasons or you wish to connect securely whenever remote FTP server supports it. Default is false since it might trigger certificate verification errors on misconfigured servers.

http.maxRequests

How many HTTP requests to launch in parallel. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_MAX_REQUESTS environment variable. Default is 5.

http.minSessions

The number of curl sessions (counted across slots) to be kept across requests. They will not be ended with curl_easy_cleanup() until http_cleanup() is invoked. If USE_CURL_MULTI is not defined, this value will be capped at 1. Defaults to 1.

http.postBuffer

Maximum size in bytes of the buffer used by smart HTTP transports when POSTing data to the remote system. For requests larger than this buffer size, HTTP/1.1 and Transfer-Encoding: chunked is used to avoid creating a massive pack file locally. Default is 1 MiB, which is sufficient for most requests.

http.lowSpeedLimit, http.lowSpeedTime

If the HTTP transfer speed is less than http.lowSpeedLimit for longer than http.lowSpeedTime seconds, the transfer is aborted. Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_LIMIT and GIT_HTTP_LOW_SPEED_TIME environment variables.

http.noEPSV

A boolean which disables using of EPSV ftp command by curl. This can helpful with some "poor" ftp servers which don’t support EPSV mode. Can be overridden by the GIT_CURL_FTP_NO_EPSV environment variable. Default is false (curl will use EPSV).

http.userAgent

The HTTP USER_AGENT string presented to an HTTP server. The default value represents the version of the client Git such as git/1.7.1. This option allows you to override this value to a more common value such as Mozilla/4.0. This may be necessary, for instance, if connecting through a firewall that restricts HTTP connections to a set of common USER_AGENT strings (but not including those like git/1.7.1). Can be overridden by the GIT_HTTP_USER_AGENT environment variable.

http.followRedirects

Whether git should follow HTTP redirects. If set to true, git will transparently follow any redirect issued by a server it encounters. If set to false, git will treat all redirects as errors. If set to initial, git will follow redirects only for the initial request to a remote, but not for subsequent follow-up HTTP requests. Since git uses the redirected URL as the base for the follow-up requests, this is generally sufficient. The default is initial.

http.<url>.*

Any of the http.* options above can be applied selectively to some URLs. For a config key to match a URL, each element of the config key is compared to that of the URL, in the following order:

Scheme (e.g., https in https://example.com/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL.
Host/domain name (e.g., example.com in https://example.com/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL.
Port number (e.g., 8080 in http://example.com:8080/). This field must match exactly between the config key and the URL. Omitted port numbers are automatically converted to the correct default for the scheme before matching.
Path (e.g., repo.git in https://example.com/repo.git). The path field of the config key must match the path field of the URL either exactly or as a prefix of slash-delimited path elements. This means a config key with path foo/ matches URL path foo/bar. A prefix can only match on a slash (/) boundary. Longer matches take precedence (so a config key with path foo/bar is a better match to URL path foo/bar than a config key with just path foo/).
User name (e.g., user in https://user@example.com/repo.git). If the config key has a user name it must match the user name in the URL exactly. If the config key does not have a user name, that config key will match a URL with any user name (including none), but at a lower precedence than a config key with a user name.

The list above is ordered by decreasing precedence; a URL that matches a config key’s path is preferred to one that matches its user name. For example, if the URL is https://user@example.com/foo/bar a config key match of https://example.com/foo will be preferred over a config key match of https://user@example.com.

All URLs are normalized before attempting any matching (the password part, if embedded in the URL, is always ignored for matching purposes) so that equivalent URLs that are simply spelled differently will match properly. Environment variable settings always override any matches. The URLs that are matched against are those given directly to Git commands. This means any URLs visited as a result of a redirection do not participate in matching.

i18n.commitEncoding

Character encoding the commit messages are stored in; Git itself does not care per se, but this information is necessary e.g. when importing commits from emails or in the gitk graphical history browser (and possibly at other places in the future or in other porcelains). See e.g. git-mailinfo[1]. Defaults to utf-8.

i18n.logOutputEncoding

Character encoding the commit messages are converted to when running git log and friends.

imap

The configuration variables in the imap section are described in git-imap-send[1].

index.version

Specify the version with which new index files should be initialized. This does not affect existing repositories.

init.templateDir

Specify the directory from which templates will be copied. (See the "TEMPLATE DIRECTORY" section of git-init[1].)

instaweb.browser

Specify the program that will be used to browse your working repository in gitweb. See git-instaweb[1].

instaweb.httpd

The HTTP daemon command-line to start gitweb on your working repository. See git-instaweb[1].

instaweb.local

If true the web server started by git-instaweb[1] will be bound to the local IP (127.0.0.1).

instaweb.modulePath

The default module path for git-instaweb[1] to use instead of /usr/lib/apache2/modules. Only used if httpd is Apache.

instaweb.port

The port number to bind the gitweb httpd to. See git-instaweb[1].

interactive.singleKey

In interactive commands, allow the user to provide one-letter input with a single key (i.e., without hitting enter). Currently this is used by the --patch mode of git-add[1], git-checkout[1], git-commit[1], git-reset[1], and git-stash[1]. Note that this setting is silently ignored if portable keystroke input is not available; requires the Perl module Term::ReadKey.

interactive.diffFilter

When an interactive command (such as git add --patch) shows a colorized diff, git will pipe the diff through the shell command defined by this configuration variable. The command may mark up the diff further for human consumption, provided that it retains a one-to-one correspondence with the lines in the original diff. Defaults to disabled (no filtering).

log.abbrevCommit

If true, makes git-log[1], git-show[1], and git-whatchanged[1] assume --abbrev-commit. You may override this option with --no-abbrev-commit.

log.date

Set the default date-time mode for the log command. Setting a value for log.date is similar to using git log's --date option. See git-log[1] for details.

log.decorate

Print out the ref names of any commits that are shown by the log command. If short is specified, the ref name prefixes refs/heads/, refs/tags/ and refs/remotes/ will not be printed. If full is specified, the full ref name (including prefix) will be printed. If auto is specified, then if the output is going to a terminal, the ref names are shown as if short were given, otherwise no ref names are shown. This is the same as the --decorate option of the git log.

log.follow

If true, git log will act as if the --follow option was used when a single <path> is given. This has the same limitations as --follow, i.e. it cannot be used to follow multiple files and does not work well on non-linear history.

log.graphColors

A list of colors, separated by commas, that can be used to draw history lines in git log --graph.

log.showRoot

If true, the initial commit will be shown as a big creation event. This is equivalent to a diff against an empty tree. Tools like git-log[1] or git-whatchanged[1], which normally hide the root commit will now show it. True by default.

log.mailmap

If true, makes git-log[1], git-show[1], and git-whatchanged[1] assume --use-mailmap.

mailinfo.scissors

If true, makes git-mailinfo[1] (and therefore git-am[1]) act by default as if the --scissors option was provided on the command-line. When active, this features removes everything from the message body before a scissors line (i.e. consisting mainly of ">8", "8<" and "-").

mailmap.file

The location of an augmenting mailmap file. The default mailmap, located in the root of the repository, is loaded first, then the mailmap file pointed to by this variable. The location of the mailmap file may be in a repository subdirectory, or somewhere outside of the repository itself. See git-shortlog[1] and git-blame[1].

mailmap.blob

Like mailmap.file, but consider the value as a reference to a blob in the repository. If both mailmap.file and mailmap.blob are given, both are parsed, with entries from mailmap.file taking precedence. In a bare repository, this defaults to HEAD:.mailmap. In a non-bare repository, it defaults to empty.

man.viewer

Specify the programs that may be used to display help in the man format. See git-help[1].

man.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified man viewer. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the man page passed as argument. (See git-help[1].)

man.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool that may be used to display help in the man format. See git-help[1].

merge.conflictStyle

Specify the style in which conflicted hunks are written out to working tree files upon merge. The default is "merge", which shows a <<<<<<< conflict marker, changes made by one side, a ======= marker, changes made by the other side, and then a >>>>>>> marker. An alternate style, "diff3", adds a ||||||| marker and the original text before the ======= marker.

merge.defaultToUpstream

If merge is called without any commit argument, merge the upstream branches configured for the current branch by using their last observed values stored in their remote-tracking branches. The values of the branch.<current branch>.merge that name the branches at the remote named by branch.<current branch>.remote are consulted, and then they are mapped via remote.<remote>.fetch to their corresponding remote-tracking branches, and the tips of these tracking branches are merged.

merge.ff

By default, Git does not create an extra merge commit when merging a commit that is a descendant of the current commit. Instead, the tip of the current branch is fast-forwarded. When set to false, this variable tells Git to create an extra merge commit in such a case (equivalent to giving the --no-ff option from the command line). When set to only, only such fast-forward merges are allowed (equivalent to giving the --ff-only option from the command line).

merge.branchdesc

In addition to branch names, populate the log message with the branch description text associated with them. Defaults to false.

merge.log

In addition to branch names, populate the log message with at most the specified number of one-line descriptions from the actual commits that are being merged. Defaults to false, and true is a synonym for 20.

merge.renameLimit

The number of files to consider when performing rename detection during a merge; if not specified, defaults to the value of diff.renameLimit.

merge.renormalize

Tell Git that canonical representation of files in the repository has changed over time (e.g. earlier commits record text files with CRLF line endings, but recent ones use LF line endings). In such a repository, Git can convert the data recorded in commits to a canonical form before performing a merge to reduce unnecessary conflicts. For more information, see section "Merging branches with differing checkin/checkout attributes" in gitattributes[5].

merge.stat

Whether to print the diffstat between ORIG_HEAD and the merge result at the end of the merge. True by default.

merge.tool

Controls which merge tool is used by git-mergetool[1]. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom merge tool and requires that a corresponding mergetool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.

araxis
bc
bc3
codecompare
deltawalker
diffmerge
diffuse
ecmerge
emerge
examdiff
gvimdiff
gvimdiff2
gvimdiff3
kdiff3
meld
opendiff
p4merge
tkdiff
tortoisemerge
vimdiff
vimdiff2
vimdiff3
winmerge
xxdiff

merge.verbosity

Controls the amount of output shown by the recursive merge strategy. Level 0 outputs nothing except a final error message if conflicts were detected. Level 1 outputs only conflicts, 2 outputs conflicts and file changes. Level 5 and above outputs debugging information. The default is level 2. Can be overridden by the GIT_MERGE_VERBOSITY environment variable.

merge.<driver>.name

Defines a human-readable name for a custom low-level merge driver. See gitattributes[5] for details.

merge.<driver>.driver

Defines the command that implements a custom low-level merge driver. See gitattributes[5] for details.

merge.<driver>.recursive

Names a low-level merge driver to be used when performing an internal merge between common ancestors. See gitattributes[5] for details.

mergetool.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH.

mergetool.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified merge tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: BASE is the name of a temporary file containing the common base of the files to be merged, if available; LOCAL is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file on the current branch; REMOTE is the name of a temporary file containing the contents of the file from the branch being merged; MERGED contains the name of the file to which the merge tool should write the results of a successful merge.

mergetool.<tool>.trustExitCode

For a custom merge command, specify whether the exit code of the merge command can be used to determine whether the merge was successful. If this is not set to true then the merge target file timestamp is checked and the merge assumed to have been successful if the file has been updated, otherwise the user is prompted to indicate the success of the merge.

mergetool.meld.hasOutput

Older versions of meld do not support the --output option. Git will attempt to detect whether meld supports --output by inspecting the output of meld --help. Configuring mergetool.meld.hasOutput will make Git skip these checks and use the configured value instead. Setting mergetool.meld.hasOutput to true tells Git to unconditionally use the --output option, and false avoids using --output.

mergetool.keepBackup

After performing a merge, the original file with conflict markers can be saved as a file with a .orig extension. If this variable is set to false then this file is not preserved. Defaults to true (i.e. keep the backup files).

mergetool.keepTemporaries

When invoking a custom merge tool, Git uses a set of temporary files to pass to the tool. If the tool returns an error and this variable is set to true, then these temporary files will be preserved, otherwise they will be removed after the tool has exited. Defaults to false.

mergetool.writeToTemp

Git writes temporary BASE, LOCAL, and REMOTE versions of conflicting files in the worktree by default. Git will attempt to use a temporary directory for these files when set true. Defaults to false.

mergetool.prompt

Prompt before each invocation of the merge resolution program.

notes.mergeStrategy

Which merge strategy to choose by default when resolving notes conflicts. Must be one of manual, ours, theirs, union, or cat_sort_uniq. Defaults to manual. See "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section of git-notes[1] for more information on each strategy.

notes.<name>.mergeStrategy

Which merge strategy to choose when doing a notes merge into refs/notes/<name>. This overrides the more general "notes.mergeStrategy". See the "NOTES MERGE STRATEGIES" section in git-notes[1] for more information on the available strategies.

notes.displayRef

The (fully qualified) refname from which to show notes when showing commit messages. The value of this variable can be set to a glob, in which case notes from all matching refs will be shown. You may also specify this configuration variable several times. A warning will be issued for refs that do not exist, but a glob that does not match any refs is silently ignored.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_DISPLAY_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

The effective value of "core.notesRef" (possibly overridden by GIT_NOTES_REF) is also implicitly added to the list of refs to be displayed.

notes.rewrite.<command>

When rewriting commits with <command> (currently amend or rebase) and this variable is set to true, Git automatically copies your notes from the original to the rewritten commit. Defaults to true, but see "notes.rewriteRef" below.

notes.rewriteMode

When copying notes during a rewrite (see the "notes.rewrite.<command>" option), determines what to do if the target commit already has a note. Must be one of overwrite, concatenate, cat_sort_uniq, or ignore. Defaults to concatenate.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_MODE environment variable.

notes.rewriteRef

When copying notes during a rewrite, specifies the (fully qualified) ref whose notes should be copied. The ref may be a glob, in which case notes in all matching refs will be copied. You may also specify this configuration several times.

Does not have a default value; you must configure this variable to enable note rewriting. Set it to refs/notes/commits to enable rewriting for the default commit notes.

This setting can be overridden with the GIT_NOTES_REWRITE_REF environment variable, which must be a colon separated list of refs or globs.

pack.window

The size of the window used by git-pack-objects[1] when no window size is given on the command line. Defaults to 10.

pack.depth

The maximum delta depth used by git-pack-objects[1] when no maximum depth is given on the command line. Defaults to 50.

pack.windowMemory

The maximum size of memory that is consumed by each thread in git-pack-objects[1] for pack window memory when no limit is given on the command line. The value can be suffixed with "k", "m", or "g". When left unconfigured (or set explicitly to 0), there will be no limit.

pack.compression

An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to -1, the zlib default, which is "a default compromise between speed and compression (currently equivalent to level 6)."

Note that changing the compression level will not automatically recompress all existing objects. You can force recompression by passing the -F option to git-repack[1].

pack.deltaCacheSize

The maximum memory in bytes used for caching deltas in git-pack-objects[1] before writing them out to a pack. This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Repacking large repositories on machines which are tight with memory might be badly impacted by this though, especially if this cache pushes the system into swapping. A value of 0 means no limit. The smallest size of 1 byte may be used to virtually disable this cache. Defaults to 256 MiB.

pack.deltaCacheLimit

The maximum size of a delta, that is cached in git-pack-objects[1]. This cache is used to speed up the writing object phase by not having to recompute the final delta result once the best match for all objects is found. Defaults to 1000.

pack.threads

Specifies the number of threads to spawn when searching for best delta matches. This requires that git-pack-objects[1] be compiled with pthreads otherwise this option is ignored with a warning. This is meant to reduce packing time on multiprocessor machines. The required amount of memory for the delta search window is however multiplied by the number of threads. Specifying 0 will cause Git to auto-detect the number of CPU’s and set the number of threads accordingly.

pack.indexVersion

Specify the default pack index version. Valid values are 1 for legacy pack index used by Git versions prior to 1.5.2, and 2 for the new pack index with capabilities for packs larger than 4 GB as well as proper protection against the repacking of corrupted packs. Version 2 is the default. Note that version 2 is enforced and this config option ignored whenever the corresponding pack is larger than 2 GB.

If you have an old Git that does not understand the version 2 *.idx file, cloning or fetching over a non native protocol (e.g. "http") that will copy both *.pack file and corresponding *.idx file from the other side may give you a repository that cannot be accessed with your older version of Git. If the *.pack file is smaller than 2 GB, however, you can use git-index-pack[1] on the *.pack file to regenerate the *.idx file.

pack.packSizeLimit

The maximum size of a pack. This setting only affects packing to a file when repacking, i.e. the git:// protocol is unaffected. It can be overridden by the --max-pack-size option of git-repack[1]. Reaching this limit results in the creation of multiple packfiles; which in turn prevents bitmaps from being created. The minimum size allowed is limited to 1 MiB. The default is unlimited. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

pack.useBitmaps

When true, git will use pack bitmaps (if available) when packing to stdout (e.g., during the server side of a fetch). Defaults to true. You should not generally need to turn this off unless you are debugging pack bitmaps.

pack.writeBitmaps (deprecated)

This is a deprecated synonym for repack.writeBitmaps.

pack.writeBitmapHashCache

When true, git will include a "hash cache" section in the bitmap index (if one is written). This cache can be used to feed git’s delta heuristics, potentially leading to better deltas between bitmapped and non-bitmapped objects (e.g., when serving a fetch between an older, bitmapped pack and objects that have been pushed since the last gc). The downside is that it consumes 4 bytes per object of disk space, and that JGit’s bitmap implementation does not understand it, causing it to complain if Git and JGit are used on the same repository. Defaults to false.

pager.<cmd>

If the value is boolean, turns on or off pagination of the output of a particular Git subcommand when writing to a tty. Otherwise, turns on pagination for the subcommand using the pager specified by the value of pager.<cmd>. If --paginate or --no-pager is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option. To disable pagination for all commands, set core.pager or GIT_PAGER to cat.

pretty.<name>

Alias for a --pretty= format string, as specified in git-log[1]. Any aliases defined here can be used just as the built-in pretty formats could. For example, running git config pretty.changelog "format:* %H %s" would cause the invocation git log --pretty=changelog to be equivalent to running git log "--pretty=format:* %H %s". Note that an alias with the same name as a built-in format will be silently ignored.

protocol.allow

If set, provide a user defined default policy for all protocols which don’t explicitly have a policy (protocol.<name>.allow). By default, if unset, known-safe protocols (http, https, git, ssh, file) have a default policy of always, known-dangerous protocols (ext) have a default policy of never, and all other protocols have a default policy of user. Supported policies:

always - protocol is always able to be used.
never - protocol is never able to be used.
user - protocol is only able to be used when GIT_PROTOCOL_FROM_USER is either unset or has a value of 1. This policy should be used when you want a protocol to be directly usable by the user but don’t want it used by commands which execute clone/fetch/push commands without user input, e.g. recursive submodule initialization.

protocol.<name>.allow

Set a policy to be used by protocol <name> with clone/fetch/push commands. See protocol.allow above for the available policies.

The protocol names currently used by git are:

file: any local file-based path (including file:// URLs, or local paths)
git: the anonymous git protocol over a direct TCP connection (or proxy, if configured)
ssh: git over ssh (including host:path syntax, ssh://, etc).
http: git over http, both "smart http" and "dumb http". Note that this does not include https; if you want to configure both, you must do so individually.
any external helpers are named by their protocol (e.g., use hg to allow the git-remote-hg helper)

pull.ff

pull.rebase

When true, rebase branches on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when "git pull" is run. See "branch.<name>.rebase" for setting this on a per-branch basis.

When preserve, also pass --preserve-merges along to git rebase so that locally committed merge commits will not be flattened by running git pull.

When the value is interactive, the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see git-rebase[1] for details).

pull.octopus

The default merge strategy to use when pulling multiple branches at once.

pull.twohead

The default merge strategy to use when pulling a single branch.

push.default

Defines the action git push should take if no refspec is explicitly given. Different values are well-suited for specific workflows; for instance, in a purely central workflow (i.e. the fetch source is equal to the push destination), upstream is probably what you want. Possible values are:

nothing - do not push anything (error out) unless a refspec is explicitly given. This is primarily meant for people who want to avoid mistakes by always being explicit.
current - push the current branch to update a branch with the same name on the receiving end. Works in both central and non-central workflows.
upstream - push the current branch back to the branch whose changes are usually integrated into the current branch (which is called @{upstream}). This mode only makes sense if you are pushing to the same repository you would normally pull from (i.e. central workflow).
tracking - This is a deprecated synonym for upstream.
simple - in centralized workflow, work like upstream with an added safety to refuse to push if the upstream branch’s name is different from the local one.

When pushing to a remote that is different from the remote you normally pull from, work as current. This is the safest option and is suited for beginners.

This mode has become the default in Git 2.0.
matching - push all branches having the same name on both ends. This makes the repository you are pushing to remember the set of branches that will be pushed out (e.g. if you always push maint and master there and no other branches, the repository you push to will have these two branches, and your local maint and master will be pushed there).

To use this mode effectively, you have to make sure all the branches you would push out are ready to be pushed out before running git push, as the whole point of this mode is to allow you to push all of the branches in one go. If you usually finish work on only one branch and push out the result, while other branches are unfinished, this mode is not for you. Also this mode is not suitable for pushing into a shared central repository, as other people may add new branches there, or update the tip of existing branches outside your control.

This used to be the default, but not since Git 2.0 (simple is the new default).

push.followTags

If set to true enable --follow-tags option by default. You may override this configuration at time of push by specifying --no-follow-tags.

push.gpgSign

May be set to a boolean value, or the string if-asked. A true value causes all pushes to be GPG signed, as if --signed is passed to git-push[1]. The string if-asked causes pushes to be signed if the server supports it, as if --signed=if-asked is passed to git push. A false value may override a value from a lower-priority config file. An explicit command-line flag always overrides this config option.

push.recurseSubmodules

Make sure all submodule commits used by the revisions to be pushed are available on a remote-tracking branch. If the value is check then Git will verify that all submodule commits that changed in the revisions to be pushed are available on at least one remote of the submodule. If any commits are missing, the push will be aborted and exit with non-zero status. If the value is on-demand then all submodules that changed in the revisions to be pushed will be pushed. If on-demand was not able to push all necessary revisions it will also be aborted and exit with non-zero status. If the value is no then default behavior of ignoring submodules when pushing is retained. You may override this configuration at time of push by specifying --recurse-submodules=check|on-demand|no.

rebase.stat

Whether to show a diffstat of what changed upstream since the last rebase. False by default.

rebase.autoSquash

If set to true enable --autosquash option by default.

rebase.autoStash

When set to true, automatically create a temporary stash before the operation begins, and apply it after the operation ends. This means that you can run rebase on a dirty worktree. However, use with care: the final stash application after a successful rebase might result in non-trivial conflicts. Defaults to false.

rebase.missingCommitsCheck

If set to "warn", git rebase -i will print a warning if some commits are removed (e.g. a line was deleted), however the rebase will still proceed. If set to "error", it will print the previous warning and stop the rebase, git rebase --edit-todo can then be used to correct the error. If set to "ignore", no checking is done. To drop a commit without warning or error, use the drop command in the todo-list. Defaults to "ignore".

rebase.instructionFormat

A format string, as specified in git-log[1], to be used for the instruction list during an interactive rebase. The format will automatically have the long commit hash prepended to the format.

receive.advertiseAtomic

By default, git-receive-pack will advertise the atomic push capability to its clients. If you don’t want to advertise this capability, set this variable to false.

receive.advertisePushOptions

By default, git-receive-pack will advertise the push options capability to its clients. If you don’t want to advertise this capability, set this variable to false.

receive.autogc

By default, git-receive-pack will run "git-gc --auto" after receiving data from git-push and updating refs. You can stop it by setting this variable to false.

receive.certNonceSeed

By setting this variable to a string, git receive-pack will accept a git push --signed and verifies it by using a "nonce" protected by HMAC using this string as a secret key.

receive.certNonceSlop

When a git push --signed sent a push certificate with a "nonce" that was issued by a receive-pack serving the same repository within this many seconds, export the "nonce" found in the certificate to GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE to the hooks (instead of what the receive-pack asked the sending side to include). This may allow writing checks in pre-receive and post-receive a bit easier. Instead of checking GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_SLOP environment variable that records by how many seconds the nonce is stale to decide if they want to accept the certificate, they only can check GIT_PUSH_CERT_NONCE_STATUS is OK.

receive.fsckObjects

If it is set to true, git-receive-pack will check all received objects. It will abort in the case of a malformed object or a broken link. The result of an abort are only dangling objects. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.

receive.fsck.<msg-id>

When receive.fsckObjects is set to true, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the receive.fsck.<msg-id> setting where the <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email" means that setting receive.fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.

This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories which would not pass pushing when receive.fsckObjects = true, allowing the host to accept repositories with certain known issues but still catch other issues.

receive.fsck.skipList

receive.keepAlive

After receiving the pack from the client, receive-pack may produce no output (if --quiet was specified) while processing the pack, causing some networks to drop the TCP connection. With this option set, if receive-pack does not transmit any data in this phase for receive.keepAlive seconds, it will send a short keepalive packet. The default is 5 seconds; set to 0 to disable keepalives entirely.

receive.unpackLimit

If the number of objects received in a push is below this limit then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

receive.maxInputSize

If the size of the incoming pack stream is larger than this limit, then git-receive-pack will error out, instead of accepting the pack file. If not set or set to 0, then the size is unlimited.

receive.denyDeletes

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the ref. Use this to prevent such a ref deletion via a push.

receive.denyDeleteCurrent

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update that deletes the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository.

receive.denyCurrentBranch

If set to true or "refuse", git-receive-pack will deny a ref update to the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository. Such a push is potentially dangerous because it brings the HEAD out of sync with the index and working tree. If set to "warn", print a warning of such a push to stderr, but allow the push to proceed. If set to false or "ignore", allow such pushes with no message. Defaults to "refuse".

Another option is "updateInstead" which will update the working tree if pushing into the current branch. This option is intended for synchronizing working directories when one side is not easily accessible via interactive ssh (e.g. a live web site, hence the requirement that the working directory be clean). This mode also comes in handy when developing inside a VM to test and fix code on different Operating Systems.

By default, "updateInstead" will refuse the push if the working tree or the index have any difference from the HEAD, but the push-to-checkout hook can be used to customize this. See githooks[5].

receive.denyNonFastForwards

If set to true, git-receive-pack will deny a ref update which is not a fast-forward. Use this to prevent such an update via a push, even if that push is forced. This configuration variable is set when initializing a shared repository.

receive.hideRefs

This variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to receive-pack (and so affects pushes, but not fetches). An attempt to update or delete a hidden ref by git push is rejected.

receive.updateServerInfo

If set to true, git-receive-pack will run git-update-server-info after receiving data from git-push and updating refs.

receive.shallowUpdate

If set to true, .git/shallow can be updated when new refs require new shallow roots. Otherwise those refs are rejected.

remote.pushDefault

The remote to push to by default. Overrides branch.<name>.remote for all branches, and is overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote for specific branches.

remote.<name>.url

The URL of a remote repository. See git-fetch[1] or git-push[1].

remote.<name>.pushurl

The push URL of a remote repository. See git-push[1].

remote.<name>.proxy

For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the URL to the proxy to use for that remote. Set to the empty string to disable proxying for that remote.

remote.<name>.proxyAuthMethod

For remotes that require curl (http, https and ftp), the method to use for authenticating against the proxy in use (probably set in remote.<name>.proxy). See http.proxyAuthMethod.

remote.<name>.fetch

The default set of "refspec" for git-fetch[1]. See git-fetch[1].

remote.<name>.push

The default set of "refspec" for git-push[1]. See git-push[1].

remote.<name>.mirror

If true, pushing to this remote will automatically behave as if the --mirror option was given on the command line.

remote.<name>.skipDefaultUpdate

If true, this remote will be skipped by default when updating using git-fetch[1] or the update subcommand of git-remote[1].

remote.<name>.skipFetchAll

If true, this remote will be skipped by default when updating using git-fetch[1] or the update subcommand of git-remote[1].

remote.<name>.receivepack

The default program to execute on the remote side when pushing. See option --receive-pack of git-push[1].

remote.<name>.uploadpack

The default program to execute on the remote side when fetching. See option --upload-pack of git-fetch-pack[1].

remote.<name>.tagOpt

Setting this value to --no-tags disables automatic tag following when fetching from remote <name>. Setting it to --tags will fetch every tag from remote <name>, even if they are not reachable from remote branch heads. Passing these flags directly to git-fetch[1] can override this setting. See options --tags and --no-tags of git-fetch[1].

remote.<name>.vcs

Setting this to a value <vcs> will cause Git to interact with the remote with the git-remote-<vcs> helper.

remote.<name>.prune

When set to true, fetching from this remote by default will also remove any remote-tracking references that no longer exist on the remote (as if the --prune option was given on the command line). Overrides fetch.prune settings, if any.

remotes.<group>

The list of remotes which are fetched by "git remote update <group>". See git-remote[1].

repack.useDeltaBaseOffset

By default, git-repack[1] creates packs that use delta-base offset. If you need to share your repository with Git older than version 1.4.4, either directly or via a dumb protocol such as http, then you need to set this option to "false" and repack. Access from old Git versions over the native protocol are unaffected by this option.

repack.packKeptObjects

If set to true, makes git repack act as if --pack-kept-objects was passed. See git-repack[1] for details. Defaults to false normally, but true if a bitmap index is being written (either via --write-bitmap-index or repack.writeBitmaps).

repack.writeBitmaps

When true, git will write a bitmap index when packing all objects to disk (e.g., when git repack -a is run). This index can speed up the "counting objects" phase of subsequent packs created for clones and fetches, at the cost of some disk space and extra time spent on the initial repack. This has no effect if multiple packfiles are created. Defaults to false.

rerere.autoUpdate

When set to true, git-rerere updates the index with the resulting contents after it cleanly resolves conflicts using previously recorded resolution. Defaults to false.

rerere.enabled

Activate recording of resolved conflicts, so that identical conflict hunks can be resolved automatically, should they be encountered again. By default, git-rerere[1] is enabled if there is an rr-cache directory under the $GIT_DIR, e.g. if "rerere" was previously used in the repository.

sendemail.identity

A configuration identity. When given, causes values in the sendemail.<identity> subsection to take precedence over values in the sendemail section. The default identity is the value of sendemail.identity.

sendemail.smtpEncryption

See git-send-email[1] for description. Note that this setting is not subject to the identity mechanism.

sendemail.smtpssl (deprecated)

Deprecated alias for sendemail.smtpEncryption = ssl.

sendemail.smtpsslcertpath

Path to ca-certificates (either a directory or a single file). Set it to an empty string to disable certificate verification.

sendemail.<identity>.*

Identity-specific versions of the sendemail.* parameters found below, taking precedence over those when the this identity is selected, through command-line or sendemail.identity.

sendemail.aliasesFile

sendemail.aliasFileType

sendemail.annotate

sendemail.bcc

sendemail.cc

sendemail.ccCmd

sendemail.chainReplyTo

sendemail.confirm

sendemail.envelopeSender

sendemail.from

sendemail.multiEdit

sendemail.signedoffbycc

sendemail.smtpPass

sendemail.suppresscc

sendemail.suppressFrom

sendemail.to

sendemail.smtpDomain

sendemail.smtpServer

sendemail.smtpServerPort

sendemail.smtpServerOption

sendemail.smtpUser

sendemail.thread

sendemail.transferEncoding

sendemail.validate

sendemail.xmailer

See git-send-email[1] for description.

sendemail.signedoffcc (deprecated)

Deprecated alias for sendemail.signedoffbycc.

showbranch.default

The default set of branches for git-show-branch[1]. See git-show-branch[1].

status.relativePaths

By default, git-status[1] shows paths relative to the current directory. Setting this variable to false shows paths relative to the repository root (this was the default for Git prior to v1.5.4).

status.short

Set to true to enable --short by default in git-status[1]. The option --no-short takes precedence over this variable.

status.branch

Set to true to enable --branch by default in git-status[1]. The option --no-branch takes precedence over this variable.

status.displayCommentPrefix

If set to true, git-status[1] will insert a comment prefix before each output line (starting with core.commentChar, i.e. # by default). This was the behavior of git-status[1] in Git 1.8.4 and previous. Defaults to false.

status.showUntrackedFiles

By default, git-status[1] and git-commit[1] show files which are not currently tracked by Git. Directories which contain only untracked files, are shown with the directory name only. Showing untracked files means that Git needs to lstat() all the files in the whole repository, which might be slow on some systems. So, this variable controls how the commands displays the untracked files. Possible values are:

no - Show no untracked files.
normal - Show untracked files and directories.
all - Show also individual files in untracked directories.

If this variable is not specified, it defaults to normal. This variable can be overridden with the -u|--untracked-files option of git-status[1] and git-commit[1].

status.submoduleSummary

Defaults to false. If this is set to a non zero number or true (identical to -1 or an unlimited number), the submodule summary will be enabled and a summary of commits for modified submodules will be shown (see --summary-limit option of git-submodule[1]). Please note that the summary output command will be suppressed for all submodules when diff.ignoreSubmodules is set to all or only for those submodules where submodule.<name>.ignore=all. The only exception to that rule is that status and commit will show staged submodule changes. To also view the summary for ignored submodules you can either use the --ignore-submodules=dirty command-line option or the git submodule summary command, which shows a similar output but does not honor these settings.

stash.showPatch

If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show the stash in patch form. Defaults to false. See description of show command in git-stash[1].

stash.showStat

If this is set to true, the git stash show command without an option will show diffstat of the stash. Defaults to true. See description of show command in git-stash[1].

submodule.<name>.url

The URL for a submodule. This variable is copied from the .gitmodules file to the git config via git submodule init. The user can change the configured URL before obtaining the submodule via git submodule update. After obtaining the submodule, the presence of this variable is used as a sign whether the submodule is of interest to git commands. See git-submodule[1] and gitmodules[5] for details.

submodule.<name>.update

The default update procedure for a submodule. This variable is populated by git submodule init from the gitmodules[5] file. See description of update command in git-submodule[1].

submodule.<name>.branch

The remote branch name for a submodule, used by git submodule update --remote. Set this option to override the value found in the .gitmodules file. See git-submodule[1] and gitmodules[5] for details.

submodule.<name>.fetchRecurseSubmodules

This option can be used to control recursive fetching of this submodule. It can be overridden by using the --[no-]recurse-submodules command-line option to "git fetch" and "git pull". This setting will override that from in the gitmodules[5] file.

submodule.<name>.ignore

Defines under what circumstances "git status" and the diff family show a submodule as modified. When set to "all", it will never be considered modified (but it will nonetheless show up in the output of status and commit when it has been staged), "dirty" will ignore all changes to the submodules work tree and takes only differences between the HEAD of the submodule and the commit recorded in the superproject into account. "untracked" will additionally let submodules with modified tracked files in their work tree show up. Using "none" (the default when this option is not set) also shows submodules that have untracked files in their work tree as changed. This setting overrides any setting made in .gitmodules for this submodule, both settings can be overridden on the command line by using the "--ignore-submodules" option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting.

submodule.fetchJobs

Specifies how many submodules are fetched/cloned at the same time. A positive integer allows up to that number of submodules fetched in parallel. A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.

submodule.alternateLocation

Specifies how the submodules obtain alternates when submodules are cloned. Possible values are no, superproject. By default no is assumed, which doesn’t add references. When the value is set to superproject the submodule to be cloned computes its alternates location relative to the superprojects alternate.

submodule.alternateErrorStrategy

Specifies how to treat errors with the alternates for a submodule as computed via submodule.alternateLocation. Possible values are ignore, info, die. Default is die.

tag.forceSignAnnotated

A boolean to specify whether annotated tags created should be GPG signed. If --annotate is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option.

tag.sort

This variable controls the sort ordering of tags when displayed by git-tag[1]. Without the "--sort=<value>" option provided, the value of this variable will be used as the default.

tar.umask

This variable can be used to restrict the permission bits of tar archive entries. The default is 0002, which turns off the world write bit. The special value "user" indicates that the archiving user’s umask will be used instead. See umask(2) and git-archive[1].

transfer.fsckObjects

When fetch.fsckObjects or receive.fsckObjects are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. Defaults to false.

transfer.hideRefs

String(s) receive-pack and upload-pack use to decide which refs to omit from their initial advertisements. Use more than one definition to specify multiple prefix strings. A ref that is under the hierarchies listed in the value of this variable is excluded, and is hidden when responding to git push or git fetch. See receive.hideRefs and uploadpack.hideRefs for program-specific versions of this config.

You may also include a ! in front of the ref name to negate the entry, explicitly exposing it, even if an earlier entry marked it as hidden. If you have multiple hideRefs values, later entries override earlier ones (and entries in more-specific config files override less-specific ones).

If a namespace is in use, the namespace prefix is stripped from each reference before it is matched against transfer.hiderefs patterns. For example, if refs/heads/master is specified in transfer.hideRefs and the current namespace is foo, then refs/namespaces/foo/refs/heads/master is omitted from the advertisements but refs/heads/master and refs/namespaces/bar/refs/heads/master are still advertised as so-called "have" lines. In order to match refs before stripping, add a ^ in front of the ref name. If you combine ! and ^, ! must be specified first.

Even if you hide refs, a client may still be able to steal the target objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces[7] man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository.

transfer.unpackLimit

When fetch.unpackLimit or receive.unpackLimit are not set, the value of this variable is used instead. The default value is 100.

uploadarchive.allowUnreachable

If true, allow clients to use git archive --remote to request any tree, whether reachable from the ref tips or not. See the discussion in the "SECURITY" section of git-upload-archive[1] for more details. Defaults to false.

uploadpack.hideRefs

This variable is the same as transfer.hideRefs, but applies only to upload-pack (and so affects only fetches, not pushes). An attempt to fetch a hidden ref by git fetch will fail. See also uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant.

uploadpack.allowTipSHA1InWant

When uploadpack.hideRefs is in effect, allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object at the tip of a hidden ref (by default, such a request is rejected). See also uploadpack.hideRefs. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces[7] man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository.

uploadpack.allowReachableSHA1InWant

Allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for an object that is reachable from any ref tip. However, note that calculating object reachability is computationally expensive. Defaults to false. Even if this is false, a client may be able to steal objects via the techniques described in the "SECURITY" section of the gitnamespaces[7] man page; it’s best to keep private data in a separate repository.

uploadpack.allowAnySHA1InWant

Allow upload-pack to accept a fetch request that asks for any object at all. Defaults to false.

uploadpack.keepAlive

When upload-pack has started pack-objects, there may be a quiet period while pack-objects prepares the pack. Normally it would output progress information, but if --quiet was used for the fetch, pack-objects will output nothing at all until the pack data begins. Some clients and networks may consider the server to be hung and give up. Setting this option instructs upload-pack to send an empty keepalive packet every uploadpack.keepAlive seconds. Setting this option to 0 disables keepalive packets entirely. The default is 5 seconds.

uploadpack.packObjectsHook

If this option is set, when upload-pack would run git pack-objects to create a packfile for a client, it will run this shell command instead. The pack-objects command and arguments it would have run (including the git pack-objects at the beginning) are appended to the shell command. The stdin and stdout of the hook are treated as if pack-objects itself was run. I.e., upload-pack will feed input intended for pack-objects to the hook, and expects a completed packfile on stdout.

Note that this configuration variable is ignored if it is seen in the repository-level config (this is a safety measure against fetching from untrusted repositories).

url.<base>.insteadOf

Any URL that starts with this value will be rewritten to start, instead, with <base>. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories, and serves them with multiple access methods, and some users need to use different access methods, this feature allows people to specify any of the equivalent URLs and have Git automatically rewrite the URL to the best alternative for the particular user, even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one insteadOf strings match a given URL, the longest match is used.

url.<base>.pushInsteadOf

Any URL that starts with this value will not be pushed to; instead, it will be rewritten to start with <base>, and the resulting URL will be pushed to. In cases where some site serves a large number of repositories, and serves them with multiple access methods, some of which do not allow push, this feature allows people to specify a pull-only URL and have Git automatically use an appropriate URL to push, even for a never-before-seen repository on the site. When more than one pushInsteadOf strings match a given URL, the longest match is used. If a remote has an explicit pushurl, Git will ignore this setting for that remote.

user.email

Your email address to be recorded in any newly created commits. Can be overridden by the GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL, GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL, and EMAIL environment variables. See git-commit-tree[1].

user.name

Your full name to be recorded in any newly created commits. Can be overridden by the GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_COMMITTER_NAME environment variables. See git-commit-tree[1].

user.useConfigOnly

Instruct Git to avoid trying to guess defaults for user.email and user.name, and instead retrieve the values only from the configuration. For example, if you have multiple email addresses and would like to use a different one for each repository, then with this configuration option set to true in the global config along with a name, Git will prompt you to set up an email before making new commits in a newly cloned repository. Defaults to false.

user.signingKey

If git-tag[1] or git-commit[1] is not selecting the key you want it to automatically when creating a signed tag or commit, you can override the default selection with this variable. This option is passed unchanged to gpg’s --local-user parameter, so you may specify a key using any method that gpg supports.

versionsort.prereleaseSuffix (deprecated)

Deprecated alias for versionsort.suffix. Ignored if versionsort.suffix is set.

versionsort.suffix

Even when version sort is used in git-tag[1], tagnames with the same base version but different suffixes are still sorted lexicographically, resulting e.g. in prerelease tags appearing after the main release (e.g. "1.0-rc1" after "1.0"). This variable can be specified to determine the sorting order of tags with different suffixes.

By specifying a single suffix in this variable, any tagname containing that suffix will appear before the corresponding main release. E.g. if the variable is set to "-rc", then all "1.0-rcX" tags will appear before "1.0". If specified multiple times, once per suffix, then the order of suffixes in the configuration will determine the sorting order of tagnames with those suffixes. E.g. if "-pre" appears before "-rc" in the configuration, then all "1.0-preX" tags will be listed before any "1.0-rcX" tags. The placement of the main release tag relative to tags with various suffixes can be determined by specifying the empty suffix among those other suffixes. E.g. if the suffixes "-rc", "", "-ck" and "-bfs" appear in the configuration in this order, then all "v4.8-rcX" tags are listed first, followed by "v4.8", then "v4.8-ckX" and finally "v4.8-bfsX".

If more than one suffixes match the same tagname, then that tagname will be sorted according to the suffix which starts at the earliest position in the tagname. If more than one different matching suffixes start at that earliest position, then that tagname will be sorted according to the longest of those suffixes. The sorting order between different suffixes is undefined if they are in multiple config files.

web.browser

Specify a web browser that may be used by some commands. Currently only git-instaweb[1] and git-help[1] may use it.

Part of the git[1] suite

Setup and Config

Getting and Creating Projects

Basic Snapshotting

Branching and Merging

Sharing and Updating Projects

Inspection and Comparison

Patching

Debugging

Email

External Systems

Server Admin

Guides

Administration

Plumbing Commands

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

OPTIONS

FILES

ENVIRONMENT

EXAMPLES

CONFIGURATION FILE

Syntax

Includes

Example

Values

Variables

GIT