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I am following the quite-easy-to-understand Git Immersion tutorial to get started, as am using Git for the very first time.

And the very first command had me in doubt. I issued the commands exactly like this:

# To login
$ ssh -T git@github.com

# To change my name
$ git config --global user.name "Joana Dine"
$ _

After all that, when I check my GitHub account, it's still the same old name. My name did not get updated. What am I doing wrong?

its_me
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  • Just checking, but did you try to `commit` anything after changing your name? – rjz Mar 16 '12 at 16:00
  • @rjz No. Those were my very first and last commands. – its_me Mar 16 '12 at 16:02
  • Ok. The `user.name` you're assigning is specific to your system, and (afaik) it's only used to display the author of a particular commit, not to modify your github account in any way. (If someone else knows better, please correct me on this!) – rjz Mar 16 '12 at 16:11

2 Answers2

2

I confirm:

git config --global user.name "Joana Dine"

This is only one of the three place Git will look for for identifying your commit done locally (on your workstation).
This is not related to GitHub.
This is related to the commit author and committer name for each of the commit you are creating locally.

If you want GitHub to show said commits as yours, once pushed on your GitHub repo, then sure, you should set your user.name and user.email to the same values than the one associated with your GitHub account.

But nothing prevent you to make commits as "foo" (git config --global user.name "foo"), and then pushing them using your GitHub credentials.
The two (commits name and GitHub credentials) aren't linked at all.

The "To change my name" should be understood as "To change my name locally for my new commits".

The only time GitHub will need credentials is when you are pulling/pushing a GitHub repo, in which case it will use the credentials used in $HOME/.netrc (or %HOME\_netrc on Windows, provided you did defined HOME, which isn't defined by default on Windows): see "Syncing with github".

Community
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VonC
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2

If you want to change the ones on github you need to rewrite your entire repo history (destructively) - see this guide

As others have said, git config uses that name information to supply the "author" field for new commits you make - it doesn't have any effect on history.

The reason it doesn't change anything in the past is because the commit author is one of the fields used to generate the hash of the commit - changing it would change the commit's identity.

Daenyth
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