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Stop Committing with the Wrong Git Identity

We've all done it. You finish a feature, push it, and then realize you just committed to your client's repo as Jane Doe <jane@personal.com> instead of Jane Dev <jane@company.com>.

Or worse — you opened a PR to an open-source project and your work email is now public forever.

Managing multiple git identities is a solved problem that nobody has solved cleanly. Until now.

The old ways

Option 1: Edit ~/.gitconfig before every project

git config --global user.email jane@company.com
# ... do some work ...
git config --global user.email jane@personal.com
# ... forget to switch back ...

You will forget. Every time.

Option 2: includeIf in ~/.gitconfig

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

Works if every project lives in a tidy folder structure. Mine don't. Yours probably don't either.

Option 3: Set it per-repo, manually, every time

git clone git@github.com:company/project.git
cd project
git config user.name "Jane Dev"
git config user.email "jane@company.com"
# also need to set core.sshCommand if using per-identity SSH keys...
# and user.signingkey if GPG signing...

Four commands every single time. That's not a workflow, that's a tax.

A better way: git-profile

git-profile is a small CLI tool I built in Go that lets you define named identity profiles and apply them to any repo with a single command.

# One-time setup
git-profile add --id work     --name "Jane Dev"  --email jane@company.com
git-profile add --id personal --name "Jane Doe"  --email jane@example.com \
                               --ssh-key ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_personal

# Per repo, one command
git-profile use work

That's it. It sets user.name, user.email, core.sshCommand, user.signingkey, and commit.gpgsign all at once, only for that repo.

What it looks like day-to-day

$ git-profile list

  PROFILE     USER         EMAIL                    SSH KEY
  ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  personal    Jane Doe     jane@example.com          ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_personal
● work        Jane Dev     jane@company.com          (default)

$ git-profile current

  Current git identity

    user.name   Jane Dev
    user.email  jane@company.com
    ssh-key     (default)

    Matched profile: work

The ● shows which profile matches your current repo's identity.

The "set it and forget it" mode

The best feature: git hooks that automatically apply the right profile before every commit and push.

cd my-work-project
git-profile install-hooks
git-profile set-default work

Now git commit in that repo always uses the work profile. No more thinking about it.

You can also set a global fallback:

git-profile set-default personal --global

Any repo without an explicit default falls back to personal.

GPG signing per identity

If you sign commits, you probably have different GPG keys per identity. git-profile handles that too:

git-profile add --id work \
  --name "Jane Dev" \
  --email jane@company.com \
  --gpg-key "ABC123DEF456" \
  --sign-commits

When you run git-profile use work, it sets all four keys at once:

user.name       = Jane Dev
user.email      = jane@company.com
user.signingkey = ABC123DEF456
commit.gpgsign  = true

Already have git configured? Import it

git-profile import --id work --global

Reads your current ~/.gitconfig (name, email, SSH command, signing key) and creates a profile from it. Zero re-typing.

Install

# Homebrew
brew install hapiio/tap/git-profile

# Go
go install github.com/hapiio/git-profile@latest

Binaries for Linux and macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel) are on the releases page.

Shell completions for bash, zsh, and fish are included.

Why I built it

I switch between a full-time job, personal projects, and a few open-source repos every day. After the third time I pushed a commit with the wrong email to a client repo, I looked for a tool that handled all of it — SSH keys, GPG keys, auto-apply hooks — in one place. I didn't find one, so I built it.

The entire tool is a single static binary with no runtime dependencies. Profiles are stored as plain JSON in ~/.config/git-profile/config.json so they're easy to back up or commit to a dotfiles repo.

Source and docs: github.com/hapiio/git-profile

Happy to hear feedback or feature requests in the issues.

Tags: git devtools golang productivity opensource