Never Push a Work Commit with Your Personal Email Again

As developers, it’s common to wear multiple hats — working on company projects during the day and tinkering with open-source or personal side-projects at night. If you’ve ever accidentally committed to Git using your personal email in a company repo (or worse, pushed your work identity to a public repo 😅), you know how frustrating it can be.

I used to run into this problem often, especially since I used the same laptop for both work and personal projects. That’s when I came up with a simple but powerful trick — automatically switching Git identities based on folder path using Git’s includeIf feature.

The Problem

Let’s say you work at a company and also contribute to open-source projects under your personal GitHub account.

If your Git config looks like this globally:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your.personal@email.com"

You might end up pushing commits to your work repository using your personal email — which may be against company policy or at least mildly embarrassing.

The alternative is to keep manually switching emails every time you move between repos — but that’s error-prone and tedious.

The Clean Solution — Conditional Git Configs

Git provides a lesser-known but super useful feature: includeIf, which allows you to include different config files based on directory paths.

Here’s how I set it up.

Step 1: Set up your main ~/.gitconfig

This is your base config file. It includes the conditional rules.

[user]
    name = Amar Prakash Pandey
    email = default@email.com

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Github/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-personal

[includeIf "gitdir:~/Gitlab/"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-work

gitdir: checks the path prefix of the repo you’re working in. If it matches, Git includes the specified config file.

Step 2: Create ~/.gitconfig-personal

[user]
    email = amar.personal@example.com

Step 3: Create ~/.gitconfig-work

[user]
    email = amar.work@example.com

The Result

With this setup:

• Any repo inside ~/Github/ will use your personal email
• Any repo inside ~/Gitlab/ will use your work email
• You don’t have to manually switch anything — Git will do the right thing automatically.

It’s like magic.env for Git. 🌟

Real-World Example

Let’s say:

• You clone an open-source repo:

  git clone git@github.com:amar/github-actions-experiments.git into ~/Github

• You clone a work repo:

  git clone git@gitlab.com:your-company/data-pipeline.git into ~/Gitlab

Now when you commit:

cd ~/Github/github-actions-experiments
git commit -m "Added custom workflow"

It will be committed with your personal identity.

cd ~/Gitlab/data-pipeline
git commit -m "Refactored ETL logic"

It will be committed with your work identity.

No need to change any settings or remember to switch emails.

Bonus Tips

• You can also include other things in your sub-configs:
  • GPG signing keys
  • Custom aliases
  • Commit templates
  • Different editor preferences
• Combine this with per-project SSH keys using ~/.ssh/config for complete isolation.
• Use git config --show-origin to debug and see where Git is pulling config from.

Final Thoughts

This simple trick has been a lifesaver for me. I no longer worry about mixing up Git identities, and it makes context switching between personal and work projects completely frictionless.

If you find yourself juggling multiple Git identities — set this up once, and thank yourself every time you git commit without thinking twice.

Resources

• Git Docs: Conditional Includes
• Pro Git Book: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2