Configuring User and Password With Git Bash

Git Bash is a terminal emulator for Windows that provides a Bash environment which allows you to run Git commands from the command line. One of the first things you‘ll want to do when setting up Git is to configure your user name and email address, which will be associated with any commits that you create.

In this comprehensive guide, we‘ll cover everything you need to know about configuring your user credentials in Git Bash, including:

• Why you need to configure user credentials in Git
• How to set your username in Git
• Setting your email address in Git
• Configuring Git to cache your login credentials
• Setting up an SSH key for authentication
• Resetting your credentials if needed

The Importance of Configuring Your Git User Credentials

When working with Git and making commits to a repository, each commit is marked with the name and email associated with the author – meaning you. This serves a few purposes:

• Identification: The username and email allow others to easily identify who made which changes to the codebase based on the information in the commit.

• Accountability: Accounting for who made what change also provides more accountability. If issues arise, blaming an incorrect or absent git config makes this difficult.

• Access Control: In corporate and open source environments alike, email domains are often used as a simple access control to verify contributors from known groups.

Without configuring this, commits will likely get marked as made by "unknown" which defeats all of these purposes. Because of this importance, setting up your Git user credentials should always be done right away on any new system before start working with version control.

Setting Your Git Username

To configure the name that will be attached to your Git commits, you simply need to use the git config command.

Here‘s the basic syntax:

git config --global user.name "FirstName LastName"

For example, I would run:

git config --global user.name "John Doe" 

This sets my Git commit user name to "John Doe" for all Git repositories on my system.

You can confirm that this worked by simply displaying the currently configured user name:

git config --global user.name

Which would display back the name you just set.

A few things to note about setting your Git username:

• The --global flag applies this username across your entire Git environment. Without this, you would need to configure it separately for each repo which is far more tedious. Almost always you will want the global configuration.

• Your Git username can be anything, it does not need to match your actual name if you do not wish to use your real name. A handle or alias is common if you prefer.

• Git differentiates capitalization in usernames, so "John" is different than "john". It is convention to use capitalization for names if setting your actual name.

• To change your username later, simply run the git config command again with a new name.

Setting Your Email in Git Config

Similar to setting your name, you can configure the email address that will be attached to Git commits like so:

git config --global user.email "email@example.com"

For example, I would likely run:

git config --global user.email "johndoe@company.com"

So any Git commits from my machine would be marked as authored by "John Doe <johndoe@company.com>"

You can verify the currently set email address by running:

git config --global user.email

Key things to know about your Git user email configuration:

• As with the username, use the --global flag so this applies to all Git repositories.

• Make sure the email is one you have access to and control so that your identity and contributions can always be verified and tracked back to you.

• Dotted variations of your email are considered different (e.g johndoe vs john.doe). Stick with the most common format for you.

• Change your configured email in the future by simply using the git config command again.

Caching Your Login Credentials in Git

When pushing changes to remote repositories with Git you typically have to verify your identity by providing username/password credentials for the remote source:

Username for ‘https://github.com‘: your_username
Password for ‘https://username@github.com‘: 

By default, Git will prompt you for credentials every time this happens. This can become tedious over time.

To avoid this, you can cache your login credentials in Git as follows:

git config --global credential.helper cache

This will move the credentials you enter into an encrypted cache that is used for future authentication for the timeout period, avoiding repetitive logins.

Note that caching credentials does entail some risk – anyone with access to the system could use the saved credentials. For private personal computers this is likely fine, but evaluate security needs for your environment before caching login information.

Using SSH Keys for Authentication

Another common way developers authenticate with Git is using SSH public-key authentication.

With this method, instead of using a username and password to verify your identity in Git operations, SSH keys are used – a public and private SSH key pair are generated, and the public key is associated with your account on the Git platform like Github or Gitlab.

When pushing or pulling code, the platforms will check for the presence of the corresponding private key to authenticate you.

Compared to basic password logins, some benefits of SSH keys include:

• No need to reenter credentials – private keys can remain securely on your local system and authenticate you in each Git session.

• Increased security – private keys are far more secure than passwords alone, especially when paired with a passphrase for the keys.

• Easier automation – no need to deal with storing passwords for running remote Git jobs like CI pipelines.

Using SSH keys for Git logins involves:

1. Generate SSH Key Pair – create a public and private SSH key locally.

2. Add Public Key to Git Platform – for example adding your public key to your Github profile.

3. Connect Repo using SSH URL Format – clone and push repositories using the SSH format urls along with your key pair.

As long as your private key remains securely on your system, Git interactions can now happen without entering credentials every time while still verifying identity.

Resetting Credentials if Needed

Over time you may need to update the username or email associated with your Git account. Or you may want to remove saved credentials from the cache if they have been compromised or you switch environments.

Resetting your Git configuration is simple.

To update just your email address, simply re-run the email configuration command with the new email:

git config --global user.email "newemail@example.com"  

To reset your credentials and remove your login cache:

git config --global --unset credential.helper

You can also reset everything together:

git config --global --unset-all
git config --global user.name "New Name"
git config --global user.email "email@address.com"

Now you‘ll be prompted again on your next Git authentication.

Conclusion

Properly configuring your Git username, email, and credentials is essential for getting started with version control and contributing to Git repositories.

Key takeaways include:

• Always set a Git user.name and user.email globally to mark your identity and contributions
• Use credential caching to save repetitive password logins
• Consider using SSH keys for improved security and convenience
• Reset your config anytime needed when changing environments or credentials

Taking just a minute to follow steps like these when working on a new machine greatly simplifies Git usage down the road. So configure that user info and those keys and get to coding!