I use git at work, which is great, but I also still work on personal side projects for fun at home. I like to use my legal name and personal email when working on my own projects, but I prefer to use my nickname and am required to use my work email when commiting to work related projects. That means I’m always trying to remember which user.name and user.email is set to a particular git repository, and dealing with setting that up correctly can be a real pain.

If all I wanted to do was set my user.email then I could write a simple git alias as described here, but what I’d really like to do is set both my user.name and user.email in a single git alias. Unfortunately you can’t easily do that in a single git alias. However, what you can do, as I learned from this blog post on advanced git aliases, is shell out to bash and from there the world is your oyster! For example, I added the following to my ~/.gitconfig file:

[alias]
  athome = "!f() { \
    git config user.name \"Yung-Jin (Joey) Hu\"; \
    git config user.email \"yungjinhu@gmail.com\"; \
    }; f"
  atwork = "!f() { \
    git config user.name \"Joey Hu\"; \
    git config user.email \"myemail@work.com\"; \
    }; f"
  whoami = "!f() { \
    git config user.name ; \
    git config user.email ; \
    }; f"

Now I’ve got these awesome git aliases that let me check my current profile (git whoami) and switch user profiles easily (git athome and git atwork) within a git repo:

$ git whoami
Joey Hu
myemail@work.com
$ git athome
$ git whoami
Yung-Jin (Joey) Hu
yungjinhu@gmail.com
$ git atwork
$ git whoami
Joey Hu
myemail@work.com