Not being a prolific GitHub user, I don’t get any spam from my git email1. That changed recently, when a commit was detected by a git (in this case GitHub) scanning company as exposing secrets. However, the commit was only exposing the secret name and I don’t see an easy way around that since the script doing that is going inside a public Docker image anyway. While they make it easy for you to have them ignore that content or unsubscribe altogether2, this reminds me; maybe I shouldn’t show a real email in my git commits.

The reason I’ve configured a real email address in my git settings is because it felt weird for me to display a GitHub no-reply address for my GitLab commits and vice versa. Well, with everything else in life, that problem can be solved by introducing a conditional, or two:

[includeIf "hasconfig:remote.*.url:git@github.com:*/*"]
  path = ~/.config/git/github.user
[includeIf "hasconfig:remote.*.url:git@gitlab.com:*/*"]
  path = ~/.config/git/gitlab.user

and in the github.user and gitlab.user files you would set their respective no-reply email addresses under a [user] section. You also don’t have to repeat yourself for other user settings, like name, you can still have a [user] anywhere else. You can also provide a fallback email within the additional [user] section, which would be used if a repository doesn’t match these conditions.

The remote URLs are being evaluated by the regular globbing rules (and two additional ones), so the documentation should be of help for more advanced/streamlined patterns.

  1. Actually I even got one meaningful connection! ↩

  2. Although when clicking the links in the email I found myself in a GitHub OAuth screen for their application :/. ↩