Skip to main content
Dan Rodney/1 min read

Git Setup: Your Name & Email

Essential Git Commands

git status

What's changed, staged, and untracked — your most-used command.

git diff

See exactly what's different before staging.

git log

Inspect commit history with --oneline or --graph for visualization.

git reset

Undo staging or commits — careful with --hard.

Build Programming Foundations at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Full-Stack Web Development Certificate teaches Git alongside the modern web stack — a must for any developer.

Discover how to set up Git for collaborative projects by inputting your name and email, allowing other developers to identify your contributions.

Setting up Git

Git helps you to work with other developers. Because you want to know who worked on a file and how to contact them, you must tell Git your name and email.

Tell Git Your Name & Email

  1. To access the command line, do the following instructions for your platform:

    • Mac: Go to Applications > Utilities and open Terminal.app.
    • Windows: Launch the Git Bash app, which may be an icon on your Desktop, or in the Windows Start menu (probably in a Git folder).

  2. Enter the following command, replacing Your Name with your actual first and last name (but keep the quotes around it):

    Git config—global user.name "Your Name"

  3. Enter the following command, replacing you@example.com with your actual email (but keep the quotes around it):

    Git config—global user.email "you@example.com"

Keep in mind that changing the name and email will only affect future work.

Checking Your Git Setup (Name & Email)

To check the name or email currently set in Git, you can run the same commands, but without the value in quotes. So you’d use these commands:

Git config—global user.name
Git config—global user.email