GeezerVison

Protected configuration refers to the system, global, and command scopes. For security reasons, certain options are only respected when they are specified in protected configuration, and ignored otherwise.

Git treats these scopes as if they are controlled by the user or a trusted administrator. This is because an attacker who controls these scopes can do substantial harm without using Git, so it is assumed that the user’s environment protects these scopes against attackers.

#
# This is the config file, and
# a '#' or ';' character indicates
# a comment
#

; core variables
[core]
	; Don't trust file modes
	filemode = false

; Our diff algorithm
[diff]
	external = /usr/local/bin/diff-wrapper
	renames = true

; Proxy settings
[core]
	gitproxy=proxy-command for kernel.org
	gitproxy=default-proxy ; for all the rest

; HTTP
[http]
	sslVerify
[http "https://weak.example.com"]
	sslVerify = false
	cookieFile = /tmp/cookie.txt

% git config set core.filemode true

% git config set --value='for kernel.org$' core.gitproxy '"ssh" for kernel.org'

% git config unset diff.renames

% git config get core.filemode

% git config get --value="for kernel.org$" core.gitproxy

% git config get --all --show-names core.gitproxy

% git config set --all core.gitproxy ssh

% git config set --value='! for ' core.gitproxy ssh

% git config set --value='[!]' section.key value

% git config set --append core.gitproxy '"proxy-command" for example.com'

#!/bin/sh
WS=$(git config get --type=color --default="blue reverse" color.diff.whitespace)
RESET=$(git config get --type=color --default="reset" "")
echo "${WS}your whitespace color or blue reverse${RESET}"

% git config get --type=bool --url=https://good.example.com http.sslverify
true
% git config get --type=bool --url=https://weak.example.com http.sslverify
false
% git config get --url=https://weak.example.com http
http.cookieFile /tmp/cookie.txt
http.sslverify false

The syntax is fairly flexible and permissive. Whitespace characters, which in this context are the space character (SP) and the horizontal tabulation (HT), are mostly ignored. The # and ; characters begin comments to the end of line. Blank lines are ignored.

The file consists of sections and variables. A section begins with the name of the section in square brackets and continues until the next section begins. Section names are case-insensitive. Only alphanumeric characters, - and . are allowed in section names. Each variable must belong to some section, which means that there must be a section header before the first setting of a variable.

Sections can be further divided into subsections. To begin a subsection put its name in double quotes, separated by space from the section name, in the section header, like in the example below:

Subsection names are case sensitive and can contain any characters except newline and the null byte. Doublequote " and backslash can be included by escaping them as \" and \\, respectively. Backslashes preceding other characters are dropped when reading; for example, \t is read as t and \0 is read as 0. Section headers cannot span multiple lines. Variables may belong directly to a section or to a given subsection. You can have [section] if you have [section "subsection"], but you don’t need to.

There is also a deprecated [section.subsection] syntax. With this syntax, the subsection name is converted to lower-case and is also compared case sensitively. These subsection names follow the same restrictions as section names.

All the other lines (and the remainder of the line after the section header) are recognized as setting variables, in the form name = value (or just name, which is a short-hand to say that the variable is the boolean "true"). The variable names are case-insensitive, allow only alphanumeric characters and -, and must start with an alphabetic character.

Whitespace characters surrounding name, = and value are discarded. Internal whitespace characters within value are retained verbatim. Comments starting with either # or ; and extending to the end of line are discarded. A line that defines a value can be continued to the next line by ending it with a backslash (\); the backslash and the end-of-line characters are discarded.

If value needs to contain leading or trailing whitespace characters, it must be enclosed in double quotation marks ("). Inside double quotation marks, double quote (") and backslash (\) characters must be escaped: use \" for " and \\ for \.

The following escape sequences (beside \" and \\) are recognized: \n for newline character (NL), \t for horizontal tabulation (HT, TAB) and \b for backspace (BS). Other char escape sequences (including octal escape sequences) are invalid.

The include and includeIf sections allow you to include config directives from another source. These sections behave identically to each other with the exception that includeIf sections may be ignored if their condition does not evaluate to true; see "Conditional includes" below.

You can include a config file from another by setting the special include.path (or includeIf.*.path) variable to the name of the file to be included. The variable takes a pathname as its value, and is subject to tilde expansion. These variables can be given multiple times.

The contents of the included file are inserted immediately, as if they had been found at the location of the include directive. If the value of the variable is a relative path, the path is considered to be relative to the configuration file in which the include directive was found. See below for examples.

You can conditionally include a config file from another by setting an includeIf.<condition>.path variable to the name of the file to be included.

The condition starts with a keyword followed by a colon and some data whose format and meaning depends on the keyword. Supported keywords are:

gitdir

The data that follows the keyword gitdir and a colon is used as a glob pattern. If the location of the .git directory matches the pattern, the include condition is met.

The .git location may be auto-discovered, or come from $GIT_DIR environment variable. If the repository is auto-discovered via a .git file (e.g. from submodules, or a linked worktree), the .git location would be the final location where the .git directory is, not where the .git file is.

The pattern can contain standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. Please refer to gitignore[5] for details. For convenience:

• If the pattern starts with ~/, ~ will be substituted with the content of the environment variable HOME.

• If the pattern starts with ./, it is replaced with the directory containing the current config file.

• If the pattern does not start with either ~/, ./ or /, **/ will be automatically prepended. For example, the pattern foo/bar becomes **/foo/bar and would match /any/path/to/foo/bar.

• If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches "foo" and everything inside, recursively.

gitdir/i

This is the same as gitdir except that matching is done case-insensitively (e.g. on case-insensitive file systems)

worktree

The data that follows the keyword worktree and a colon is used as a glob pattern. If the working directory of the current worktree matches the pattern, the include condition is met.

The worktree location is the path where files are checked out (as returned by git rev-parse --show-toplevel). This is different from gitdir, which matches the .git directory path. In a linked worktree, the worktree path is the directory where that worktree’s files are located, not the main repository’s .git directory.

The pattern uses the same glob syntax as gitdir (including ~/, ./, **/, and trailing-/ prefix matching). This condition will never match in a bare repository (which has no worktree).

Unlike gitdir, the worktree condition currently matches only the realpath-resolved worktree location. If the working tree was entered via a symbolic link, a pattern that uses the symbolic-link spelling may not match; use the real path instead.

This is useful when you want to apply configuration based on where the working tree is located on the filesystem. For example, a contributor who works on the same project both personally and as an employee can use different user.name and user.email values depending on which directory the worktree is checked out under:

[includeIf "worktree:/home/user/work/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/work.inc
[includeIf "worktree:/home/user/personal/"]
    path = ~/.config/git/personal.inc

While extensions.worktreeConfig (see git-worktree[1]) also supports per-worktree configuration, it stores the config inside each repository’s .git/config.worktree file and requires running git config --worktree inside each worktree individually. In contrast, includeIf "worktree:..." can be set once in a global or system-level configuration file (e.g. ~/.config/git/config) and applies to all repositories at once based on their worktree location.

worktree/i

This is the same as worktree except that matching is done case-insensitively (e.g. on case-insensitive file systems)

onbranch

The data that follows the keyword onbranch and a colon is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple path components. If we are in a worktree where the name of the branch that is currently checked out matches the pattern, the include condition is met.

If the pattern ends with /, ** will be automatically added. For example, the pattern foo/ becomes foo/**. In other words, it matches all branches that begin with foo/. This is useful if your branches are organized hierarchically and you would like to apply a configuration to all the branches in that hierarchy.

hasconfig:remote.*.url

The data that follows this keyword and a colon is taken to be a pattern with standard globbing wildcards and two additional ones, **/ and /**, that can match multiple components. The first time this keyword is seen, the rest of the config files will be scanned for remote URLs (without applying any values). If there exists at least one remote URL that matches this pattern, the include condition is met.

Files included by this option (directly or indirectly) are not allowed to contain remote URLs.

Note that unlike other includeIf conditions, resolving this condition relies on information that is not yet known at the point of reading the condition. A typical use case is this option being present as a system-level or global-level config, and the remote URL being in a local-level config; hence the need to scan ahead when resolving this condition. In order to avoid the chicken-and-egg problem in which potentially-included files can affect whether such files are potentially included, Git breaks the cycle by prohibiting these files from affecting the resolution of these conditions (thus, prohibiting them from declaring remote URLs).

As for the naming of this keyword, it is for forwards compatibility with a naming scheme that supports more variable-based include conditions, but currently Git only supports the exact keyword described above.

A few more notes on matching via gitdir and gitdir/i:

• Symlinks in $GIT_DIR are not resolved before matching.

• Both the symlink & realpath versions of paths will be matched outside of $GIT_DIR. E.g. if ~/git is a symlink to /mnt/storage/git, both gitdir:~/git and gitdir:/mnt/storage/git will match.

  This was not the case in the initial release of this feature in v2.13.0, which only matched the realpath version. Configuration that wants to be compatible with the initial release of this feature needs to either specify only the realpath version, or both versions.

• Note that "../" is not special and will match literally, which is unlikely what you want.

Values of many variables are treated as a simple string, but there are variables that take values of specific types and there are rules as to how to spell them.

boolean

When a variable is said to take a boolean value, many synonyms are accepted for true and false; these are all case-insensitive.

true

Boolean true literals are yes, on, true, and 1. Also, a variable defined without = <value> is taken as true.

false

Boolean false literals are no, off, false, 0 and the empty string.

When converting a value to its canonical form using the --type=bool type specifier, git config will ensure that the output is "true" or "false" (spelled in lowercase).

integer

The value for many variables that specify various sizes can be suffixed with k, M,…​ to mean "scale the number by 1024", "by 1024x1024", etc.

color

The value for a variable that takes a color is a list of colors (at most two, one for foreground and one for background) and attributes (as many as you want), separated by spaces.

The basic colors accepted are normal, black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, white and default. The first color given is the foreground; the second is the background. All the basic colors except normal and default have a bright variant that can be specified by prefixing the color with bright, like brightred.

The color normal makes no change to the color. It is the same as an empty string, but can be used as the foreground color when specifying a background color alone (for example, "normal red").

The color default explicitly resets the color to the terminal default, for example to specify a cleared background. Although it varies between terminals, this is usually not the same as setting to "white black".

Colors may also be given as numbers between 0 and 255; these use ANSI 256-color mode (but note that not all terminals may support this). If your terminal supports it, you may also specify 24-bit RGB values as hex, like #ff0ab3, or 12-bit RGB values like #f1b, which is equivalent to the 24-bit color #ff11bb.

The accepted attributes are bold, dim, ul, blink, reverse, italic, and strike (for crossed-out or "strikethrough" letters). The position of any attributes with respect to the colors (before, after, or in between), doesn’t matter. Specific attributes may be turned off by prefixing them with no or no- (e.g., noreverse, no-ul, etc).

The pseudo-attribute reset resets all colors and attributes before applying the specified coloring. For example, reset green will result in a green foreground and default background without any active attributes.

An empty color string produces no color effect at all. This can be used to avoid coloring specific elements without disabling color entirely.

For git’s pre-defined color slots, the attributes are meant to be reset at the beginning of each item in the colored output. So setting color.decorate.branch to black will paint that branch name in a plain black, even if the previous thing on the same output line (e.g. opening parenthesis before the list of branch names in log --decorate output) is set to be painted with bold or some other attribute. However, custom log formats may do more complicated and layered coloring, and the negated forms may be useful there.

pathname

A variable that takes a pathname value can be given a string that begins with "~/" or "~user/", and the usual tilde expansion happens to such a string: ~/ is expanded to the value of $HOME, and ~user/ to the specified user’s home directory.

If a path starts with %(prefix)/, the remainder is interpreted as a path relative to Git’s "runtime prefix", i.e. relative to the location where Git itself was installed. For example, %(prefix)/bin/ refers to the directory in which the Git executable itself lives. If Git was compiled without runtime prefix support, the compiled-in prefix will be substituted instead. In the unlikely event that a literal path needs to be specified that should not be expanded, it needs to be prefixed by ./, like so: ./%(prefix)/bin.

If prefixed with :(optional), the configuration variable is treated as if it does not exist, if the named path does not exist.

Note that this list is non-comprehensive and not necessarily complete. For command-specific variables, you will find a more detailed description in the appropriate manual page.

Other git-related tools may and do use their own variables. When inventing new variables for use in your own tool, make sure their names do not conflict with those that are used by Git itself and other popular tools, and describe them in your documentation.

add.ignoreErrors

add.ignore-errors (deprecated)

Tells git add to continue adding files when some files cannot be added due to indexing errors. Equivalent to the --ignore-errors option of git-add[1]. add.ignore-errors is deprecated, as it does not follow the usual naming convention for configuration variables.

advice.*

These variables control various optional help messages designed to aid new users. When left unconfigured, Git will give the message alongside instructions on how to squelch it. You can tell Git that you have understood the issue and no longer need a specific help message by setting the corresponding variable to false.

As they are intended to help human users, these messages are output to the standard error. When tools that run Git as a subprocess find them disruptive, they can set GIT_ADVICE=0 in the environment to squelch all advice messages.

addEmbeddedRepo

Shown when the user accidentally adds one git repo inside of another.

addEmptyPathspec

Shown when the user runs git add without providing the pathspec parameter.

addIgnoredFile

Shown when the user attempts to add an ignored file to the index.

amWorkDir

Shown when git-am[1] fails to apply a patch file, to tell the user the location of the file.

ambiguousFetchRefspec

Shown when a fetch refspec for multiple remotes maps to the same remote-tracking branch namespace and causes branch tracking set-up to fail.

checkoutAmbiguousRemoteBranchName

Shown when the argument to git-checkout[1] and git-switch[1] ambiguously resolves to a remote tracking branch on more than one remote in situations where an unambiguous argument would have otherwise caused a remote-tracking branch to be checked out. See the checkout.defaultRemote configuration variable for how to set a given remote to be used by default in some situations where this advice would be printed.

commitBeforeMerge

Shown when git-merge[1] refuses to merge to avoid overwriting local changes.

detachedHead

Shown when the user uses git-switch[1] or git-checkout[1] to move to the detached HEAD state, to tell the user how to create a local branch after the fact.

diverging

Shown when a fast-forward is not possible.

fetchRemoteHEADWarn

Shown when git-fetch[1] reveals that a remote HEAD differs from what is set locally and the user has opted into receiving a warning in this situation.

fetchShowForcedUpdates

Shown when git-fetch[1] takes a long time to calculate forced updates after ref updates, or to warn that the check is disabled.

forceDeleteBranch

Shown when the user tries to delete a not fully merged branch without the force option set.

ignoredHook

Shown when a hook is ignored because the hook is not set as executable.

implicitIdentity

Shown when the user’s information is guessed from the system username and domain name, to tell the user how to set their identity configuration.

mergeConflict

Shown when various commands stop because of conflicts.

nestedTag

Shown when a user attempts to recursively tag a tag object.

pushAlreadyExists

Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that does not qualify for fast-forwarding (e.g., a tag.)

pushFetchFirst

Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object we do not have.

pushNeedsForce

Shown when git-push[1] rejects an update that tries to overwrite a remote ref that points at an object that is not a commit-ish, or make the remote ref point at an object that is not a commit-ish.

pushNonFFCurrent

Shown when git-push[1] fails due to a non-fast-forward update to the current branch.

pushNonFFMatching

Shown when the user ran git-push[1] and pushed "matching refs" explicitly (i.e. used :, or specified a refspec that isn’t the current branch) and it resulted in a non-fast-forward error.

pushRefNeedsUpdate

Shown when git-push[1] rejects a forced update of a branch when its remote-tracking ref has updates that we do not have locally.

pushRepoLooksLikeRef

Shown when the repository given to git-push[1] is not a configured remote but looks like a <remote>/<branch> ref, suggesting that the remote and branch be given as separate arguments.

pushUnqualifiedRefname

Shown when git-push[1] gives up trying to guess based on the source and destination refs what remote ref namespace the source belongs in, but where we can still suggest that the user push to either refs/heads/* or refs/tags/* based on the type of the source object.

pushUpdateRejected

Set this variable to false if you want to disable pushNonFFCurrent, pushNonFFMatching, pushAlreadyExists, pushFetchFirst, pushNeedsForce, and pushRefNeedsUpdate simultaneously.

rebaseTodoError

Shown when there is an error after editing the rebase todo list.

refSyntax

Shown when the user provides an illegal ref name, to tell the user about the ref syntax documentation.

resetNoRefresh

Shown when git-reset[1] takes more than 2 seconds to refresh the index after reset, to tell the user that they can use the --no-refresh option.

resolveConflict

Shown by various commands when conflicts prevent the operation from being performed.

rmHints

Shown on failure in the output of git-rm[1], to give directions on how to proceed from the current state.

sequencerInUse

Shown when a sequencer command is already in progress.

skippedCherryPicks

Shown when git-rebase[1] skips a commit that has already been cherry-picked onto the upstream branch.

sparseIndexExpanded

Shown when a sparse index is expanded to a full index, which is likely due to an unexpected set of files existing outside of the sparse-checkout.

statusAheadBehind

Shown when git-status[1] computes the ahead/behind counts for a local ref compared to its remote tracking ref, and that calculation takes longer than expected. Will not appear if status.aheadBehind is false or the option --no-ahead-behind is given.

statusHints

Show directions on how to proceed from the current state in the output of git-status[1], in the template shown when writing commit messages in git-commit[1], and in the help message shown by git-switch[1] or git-checkout[1] when switching branches.

statusUoption

Shown when git-status[1] takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate untracked files, to tell the user that they can use the -u option.

submoduleAlternateErrorStrategyDie

Shown when a submodule.alternateErrorStrategy option configured to "die" causes a fatal error.

submoduleMergeConflict

Advice shown when a non-trivial submodule merge conflict is encountered.

submodulesNotUpdated

Shown when a user runs a submodule command that fails because git submodule update --init was not run.

suggestDetachingHead

Shown when git-switch[1] refuses to detach HEAD without the explicit --detach option.

updateSparsePath

Shown when either git-add[1] or git-rm[1] is asked to update index entries outside the current sparse checkout.

waitingForEditor

Shown when Git is waiting for editor input. Relevant when e.g. the editor is not launched inside the terminal.

worktreeAddOrphan

Shown when the user tries to create a worktree from an invalid reference, to tell the user how to create a new unborn branch instead.

alias.*

alias.*.command

Command aliases for the git[1] command wrapper. Aliases can be defined using two syntaxes:

1. Without a subsection, e.g., [alias] co = checkout. The alias name ("co" in this example) is limited to ASCII alphanumeric characters and -, and is matched case-insensitively.

2. With a subsection, e.g., [alias "co"] command = checkout. The alias name can contain any characters (except for newlines and NUL bytes), including UTF-8, and is matched case-sensitively as raw bytes. You define the action of the alias in the command.

Examples:

# Without subsection (ASCII alphanumeric and dash only)
[alias]
    co = checkout
    st = status

# With subsection (allows any characters, including UTF-8)
[alias "hämta"]
    command = fetch
[alias "rätta till"]
    command = commit --amend

With a Git alias defined, e.g.,

$ git config --global alias.last "cat-file commit HEAD"
# Which is equivalent to
$ git config --global alias.last.command "cat-file commit HEAD"

git last is equivalent to git cat-file commit HEAD.

To avoid confusion and troubles with script usage, aliases that hide existing Git commands are ignored except for deprecated commands. Arguments are split by spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping are supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.

Note that the first word of an alias does not necessarily have to be a command. It can be a command-line option that will be passed into the invocation of git. In particular, this is useful when used with -c to pass in one-time configurations or -p to force pagination. For example, loud-rebase = -c commit.verbose=true rebase can be defined such that running git loud-rebase would be equivalent to git -c commit.verbose=true rebase. Also, ps = -p status would be a helpful alias since git ps would paginate the output of git status where the original command does not.

If the alias expansion is prefixed with an exclamation point, it will be treated as a shell command. For example, defining alias.new = !gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD, the invocation git new is equivalent to running the shell command gitk --all --not ORIG_HEAD. Note:

• Shell commands will be executed from the top-level directory of a repository, which may not necessarily be the current directory.

• GIT_PREFIX is set as returned by running git rev-parse --show-prefix from the original current directory. See git-rev-parse[1].

• Shell command aliases always receive any extra arguments provided to the Git command-line as positional arguments.

  • Care should be taken if your shell alias is a "one-liner" script with multiple commands (e.g. in a pipeline), references multiple arguments, or is otherwise not able to handle positional arguments added at the end. For example: alias.cmd = "!echo $1 | grep $2" called as git cmd 1 2 will be executed as echo $1 | grep $2 1 2, which is not what you want.

  • A convenient way to deal with this is to write your script operations in an inline function that is then called with any arguments from the command-line. For example alias.cmd = "!c() { echo $1 | grep $2 ; }; c" will correctly execute the prior example.

  • Setting GIT_TRACE=1 can help you debug the command being run for your alias.

am.keepcr

If true, git-am[1] will call git-mailsplit[1] for patches in mbox format with parameter --keep-cr. In this case git-mailsplit[1] will not remove \r from lines ending with \r\n. Can be overridden by giving --no-keep-cr from the command line.

am.threeWay

By default, git-am[1] will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git-am[1] to fall back on 3-way merge if the patch records the identity of blobs it is supposed to apply to and we have those blobs available locally (equivalent to giving the --3way option from the command line). Defaults to false.

am.messageId

Add a Message-ID trailer based on the email header to the commit when using git-am[1] (see git-interpret-trailers[1]). See also the --message-id and --no-message-id options.

apply.ignoreWhitespace

When set to change, tells git apply to ignore changes in whitespace, in the same way as the --ignore-space-change option. When set to one of: no, none, never, false, it tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See git-apply[1].

apply.whitespace

Tells git apply how to handle whitespace, in the same way as the --whitespace option. See git-apply[1].

attr.tree

A reference to a tree in the repository from which to read attributes, instead of the .gitattributes file in the working tree. If the value does not resolve to a valid tree object, an empty tree is used instead. When the GIT_ATTR_SOURCE environment variable or --attr-source command line option are used, this configuration variable has no effect.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.pattern

Regular expression used to match reference names. Commits pointed to by references matching this pattern (and meeting the below criteria, like bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate and bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold) will be considered for inclusion in a pseudo-merge bitmap.

Commits are grouped into pseudo-merge groups based on whether or not any reference(s) that point at a given commit match the pattern, which is an extended regular expression.

Within a pseudo-merge group, commits may be further grouped into sub-groups based on the capture groups in the pattern. These sub-groupings are formed from the regular expressions by concatenating any capture groups from the regular expression, with a - dash in between.

For example, if the pattern is refs/tags/, then all tags (provided they meet the below criteria) will be considered candidates for the same pseudo-merge group. However, if the pattern is instead refs/remotes/([0-9])+/tags/, then tags from different remotes will be grouped into separate pseudo-merge groups, based on the remote number.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.decay

Determines the rate at which consecutive pseudo-merge bitmap groups decrease in size. Must be non-negative. This parameter can be thought of as k in the function f(n) = C * n^-k, where f(n) is the size of the `n`th group.

Setting the decay rate equal to 0 will cause all groups to be the same size. Setting the decay rate equal to 1 will cause the nth group to be 1/n the size of the initial group. Higher values of the decay rate cause consecutive groups to shrink at an increasing rate. The default is 1.

If all groups are the same size, it is possible that groups containing newer commits will be able to be used less often than earlier groups, since it is more likely that the references pointing at newer commits will be updated more often than a reference pointing at an old commit.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.sampleRate

Determines the proportion of non-bitmapped commits (among reference tips) which are selected for inclusion in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. Must be greater than 0 and less than or equal to 1. The default is 1.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.threshold

Determines the minimum age of non-bitmapped commits (among reference tips, as above) which are candidates for inclusion in an unstable pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 1.week.ago.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.maxMerges

Determines the maximum number of pseudo-merge commits among which commits may be distributed.

For pseudo-merge groups whose pattern does not contain any capture groups, this setting is applied for all commits matching the regular expression. For patterns that have one or more capture groups, this setting is applied for each distinct capture group.

For example, if your capture group is refs/tags/, then this setting will distribute all tags into a maximum of maxMerges pseudo-merge commits. However, if your capture group is, say, refs/remotes/([0-9]+)/tags/, then this setting will be applied to each remote’s set of tags individually.

Must be non-negative. The default value is 64.

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableThreshold

Determines the minimum age of commits (among reference tips, as above, however stable commits are still considered candidates even when they have been covered by a bitmap) which are candidates for a stable a pseudo-merge bitmap. The default is 1.month.ago.

Setting this threshold to a smaller value (e.g., 1.week.ago) will cause more stable groups to be generated (which impose a one-time generation cost) but those groups will likely become stale over time. Using a larger value incurs the opposite penalty (fewer stable groups which are more useful).

bitmapPseudoMerge.<name>.stableSize

Determines the size (in number of commits) of a stable psuedo-merge bitmap. The default is 512.

blame.blankBoundary

Show blank commit object name for boundary commits in git-blame[1]. This option defaults to false.

blame.coloring

This determines the coloring scheme to be applied to blame output. It can be repeatedLines, highlightRecent, or none which is the default.

blame.date

Specifies the format used to output dates in git-blame[1]. If unset the iso format is used. For supported values, see the discussion of the --date option at git-log[1].

blame.showEmail

Show the author email instead of author name in git-blame[1]. This option defaults to false.

blame.showRoot

Do not treat root commits as boundaries in git-blame[1]. This option defaults to false.

blame.ignoreRevsFile

Ignore revisions listed in the file, one unabbreviated object name per line, in git-blame[1]. Whitespace and comments beginning with # are ignored. This option may be repeated multiple times. Empty file names will reset the list of ignored revisions. This option will be handled before the command line option --ignore-revs-file.

blame.markUnblamableLines

Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we could not attribute to another commit with a * in the output of git-blame[1].

blame.markIgnoredLines

Mark lines that were changed by an ignored revision that we attributed to another commit with a ? in the output of git-blame[1].

branch.autoSetupMerge

Tells git branch, git switch and git checkout to set up new branches so that git-pull[1] will appropriately merge from the starting point branch. Note that even if this option is not set, this behavior can be chosen per-branch using the --track and --no-track options. This option defaults to true. The valid settings are:

false

no automatic setup is done

true

automatic setup is done when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch

always

automatic setup is done when the starting point is either a local branch or remote-tracking branch

inherit

if the starting point has a tracking configuration, it is copied to the new branch

simple

automatic setup is done only when the starting point is a remote-tracking branch and the new branch has the same name as the remote branch.

branch.autoSetupRebase

When a new branch is created with git branch, git switch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see branch.<name>.rebase). The valid settings are:

never

rebase is never automatically set to true.

local

rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches.

remote

rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches.

always

rebase will be set to true for all tracking branches.

See branch.autoSetupMerge for details on how to set up a branch to track another branch. This option defaults to never.

branch.sort

This variable controls the sort ordering of branches when displayed by git-branch[1]. Without the --sort=<value> option provided, the value of this variable will be used as the default. See git-for-each-ref[1] field names for valid values.

branch.<name>.remote

When on branch <name>, it tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from or push to. The remote to push to may be overridden with remote.pushDefault (for all branches). The remote to push to, for the current branch, may be further overridden by branch.<name>.pushRemote. If no remote is configured, or if you are not on any branch and there is more than one remote defined in the repository, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing. Additionally, . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository), see branch.<name>.merge's final note below.

branch.<name>.pushRemote

When on branch <name>, it overrides branch.<name>.remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch <name>. When you pull from one place (e.g. your upstream) and push to another place (e.g. your own publishing repository), you would want to set remote.pushDefault to specify the remote to push to for all branches, and use this option to override it for a specific branch. The value may be the name of a configured remote or a repository URL.

branch.<name>.merge

Defines, together with branch.<name>.remote, the upstream branch for the given branch. It tells git fetch/git pull/git rebase which branch to merge and can also affect git push (see push.default). When in branch <name>, it tells git fetch the default refspec to be marked for merging in FETCH_HEAD. The value is handled like the remote part of a refspec, and must match a ref which is fetched from the remote given by branch.<name>.remote. The merge information is used by git pull (which first calls git fetch) to lookup the default branch for merging. Without this option, git pull defaults to merge the first refspec fetched. Specify multiple values to get an octopus merge. If you wish to setup git pull so that it merges into <name> from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch.<name>.merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch.<name>.remote.

branch.<name>.mergeOptions

Sets default options for merging into branch <name>. The syntax and supported options are the same as those of git-merge[1], but option values containing whitespace characters are currently not supported.

branch.<name>.rebase

When true, rebase the branch <name> on top of the fetched branch, instead of merging the default branch from the default remote when git pull is run. See pull.rebase for doing this in a non branch-specific manner.

When merges (or just m), pass the --rebase-merges option to git rebase so that the local merge commits are included in the rebase (see git-rebase[1] for details).

When the value is interactive (or just i), the rebase is run in interactive mode.

NOTE: this is a possibly dangerous operation; do not use it unless you understand the implications (see git-rebase[1] for details).

branch.<name>.description

Branch description, can be edited with git branch --edit-description. Branch description is automatically added to the format-patch cover letter or request-pull summary.

branch.<name>.deleteMerged

If set to false, branch <name> is exempt from git branch --delete-merged. Useful for a topic branch you intend to develop further after an initial round has been merged upstream. Defaults to true. Explicit deletion via git branch -d is unaffected.

browser.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified browser. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the URLs passed as arguments. (See git-web--browse[1].)

browser.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool that may be used to browse HTML help (see -w option in git-help[1]) or a working repository in gitweb (see git-instaweb[1]).

bundle.*

The bundle.* keys may appear in a bundle list file found via the git clone --bundle-uri option. These keys currently have no effect if placed in a repository config file, though this will change in the future. See the bundle URI design document for more details.

bundle.version

This integer value advertises the version of the bundle list format used by the bundle list. Currently, the only accepted value is 1.

bundle.mode

This string value should be either all or any. This value describes whether all of the advertised bundles are required to unbundle a complete understanding of the bundled information (all) or if any one of the listed bundle URIs is sufficient (any).

bundle.heuristic

If this string-valued key exists, then the bundle list is designed to work well with incremental git fetch commands. The heuristic signals that there are additional keys available for each bundle that help determine which subset of bundles the client should download. The only value currently understood is creationToken.

bundle.<id>.*

The bundle.<id>.* keys are used to describe a single item in the bundle list, grouped under <id> for identification purposes.

bundle.<id>.uri

This string value defines the URI by which Git can reach the contents of this <id>. This URI may be a bundle file or another bundle list.

checkout.defaultRemote

When you run git checkout <something> or git switch <something> and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/<something>. This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote with a <something> reference. This setting allows for setting the name of a preferred remote that should always win when it comes to disambiguation. The typical use-case is to set this to origin.

Currently this is used by git-switch[1] and git-checkout[1] when git checkout <something> or git switch <something> will checkout the <something> branch on another remote, and by git-worktree[1] when git worktree add refers to a remote branch. This setting might be used for other checkout-like commands or functionality in the future.

checkout.guess

Provides the default value for the --guess or --no-guess option in git checkout and git switch. See git-switch[1] and git-checkout[1].

checkout.workers

The number of parallel workers to use when updating the working tree. The default is one, i.e. sequential execution. If set to a value less than one, Git will use as many workers as the number of logical cores available. This setting and checkout.thresholdForParallelism affect all commands that perform checkout. E.g. checkout, clone, reset, sparse-checkout, etc.

Note

Parallel checkout usually delivers better performance for repositories located on SSDs or over NFS. For repositories on spinning disks and/or machines with a small number of cores, the default sequential checkout often performs better. The size and compression level of a repository might also influence how well the parallel version performs.

checkout.thresholdForParallelism

When running parallel checkout with a small number of files, the cost of subprocess spawning and inter-process communication might outweigh the parallelization gains. This setting allows you to define the minimum number of files for which parallel checkout should be attempted. The default is 100.

clean.requireForce

A boolean to make git-clean refuse to delete files unless -f is given. Defaults to true.

clone.defaultRemoteName

The name of the remote to create when cloning a repository. Defaults to origin. It can be overridden by passing the --origin command-line option to git-clone[1].

clone.rejectShallow

Reject cloning a repository if it is a shallow one; this can be overridden by passing the --reject-shallow option on the command line. See git-clone[1].

clone.filterSubmodules

If a partial clone filter is provided (see --filter in git-rev-list[1]) and --recurse-submodules is used, also apply the filter to submodules.

color.advice

A boolean to enable/disable color in hints (e.g. when a push failed, see advice.* for a list). May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.advice.hint

Use customized color for hints.

color.blame.highlightRecent

Specify the line annotation color for git blame --color-by-age depending upon the age of the line.

This setting should be set to a comma-separated list of color and date settings, starting and ending with a color, the dates should be set from oldest to newest. The metadata will be colored with the specified colors if the line was introduced before the given timestamp, overwriting older timestamped colors.

Instead of an absolute timestamp relative timestamps work as well, e.g. 2.weeks.ago is valid to address anything older than 2 weeks.

It defaults to blue,12 month ago,white,1 month ago,red, which colors everything older than one year blue, recent changes between one month and one year old are kept white, and lines introduced within the last month are colored red.

color.blame.repeatedLines

Use the specified color to colorize line annotations for git blame --color-lines, if they come from the same commit as the preceding line. Defaults to cyan.

color.branch

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-branch[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.branch.<slot>

Use customized color for branch coloration. <slot> is one of current (the current branch), local (a local branch), remote (a remote-tracking branch in refs/remotes/), upstream (upstream tracking branch), plain (other refs).

color.diff

Whether to use ANSI escape sequences to add color to patches. If this is set to always, git-diff[1], git-log[1], and git-show[1] will use color for all patches. If it is set to true or auto, those commands will only use color when output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

This does not affect git-format-patch[1] or the git-diff-* plumbing commands. Can be overridden on the command line with the --color[=<when>] option.

color.diff.<slot>

Use customized color for diff colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the patch to use the specified color, and is one of context (context text - plain is a historical synonym), meta (metainformation), frag (hunk header), func (function in hunk header), old (removed lines), new (added lines), commit (commit headers), whitespace (highlighting whitespace errors), oldMoved (deleted lines), newMoved (added lines), oldMovedDimmed, oldMovedAlternative, oldMovedAlternativeDimmed, newMovedDimmed, newMovedAlternative newMovedAlternativeDimmed (See the <mode> setting of --color-moved in git-diff[1] for details), contextDimmed, oldDimmed, newDimmed, contextBold, oldBold, and newBold (see git-range-diff[1] for details).

color.decorate.<slot>

Use customized color for git log --decorate output. <slot> is one of branch, remoteBranch, tag, stash or HEAD for local branches, remote-tracking branches, tags, stash and HEAD, respectively and grafted for grafted commits.

color.grep

When set to always, always highlight matches. When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use color only when the output is written to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.grep.<slot>

Use customized color for grep colorization. <slot> specifies which part of the line to use the specified color, and is one of

context

non-matching text in context lines (when using -A, -B, or -C)

filename

filename prefix (when not using -h)

function

function name lines (when using -p)

lineNumber

line number prefix (when using -n)

column

column number prefix (when using --column)

match

matching text (same as setting matchContext and matchSelected)

matchContext

matching text in context lines

matchSelected

matching text in selected lines. Also, used to customize the following git-log[1] subcommands: --grep, --author, and --committer.

selected

non-matching text in selected lines. Also, used to customize the following git-log[1] subcommands: --grep, --author and --committer.

separator

separators between fields on a line (:, -, and =) and between hunks (--)

color.interactive

When set to always, always use colors for interactive prompts and displays (such as those used by "git-add --interactive" and "git-clean --interactive"). When false (or never), never. When set to true or auto, use colors only when the output is to the terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.interactive.<slot>

Use customized color for git add --interactive and git clean --interactive output. <slot> may be prompt, header, help or error, for four distinct types of normal output from interactive commands.

color.pager

A boolean to specify whether auto color modes should colorize output going to the pager. Defaults to true; set this to false if your pager does not understand ANSI color codes.

color.push

A boolean to enable/disable color in push errors. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.push.error

Use customized color for push errors.

color.remote

If set, keywords at the start of the line are highlighted. The keywords are "error", "warning", "hint" and "success", and are matched case-insensitively. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true). If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.remote.<slot>

Use customized color for each remote keyword. <slot> may be hint, warning, success or error which match the corresponding keyword.

color.showBranch

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-show-branch[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.status

A boolean to enable/disable color in the output of git-status[1]. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the output is to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.status.<slot>

Use customized color for status colorization. <slot> is one of header (the header text of the status message), added or updated (files which are added but not committed), changed (files which are changed but not added in the index), untracked (files which are not tracked by Git), branch (the current branch), nobranch (the color the no branch warning is shown in, defaulting to red), localBranch or remoteBranch (the local and remote branch names, respectively, when branch and tracking information is displayed in the status short-format), or unmerged (files which have unmerged changes).

color.transport

A boolean to enable/disable color when pushes are rejected. May be set to always, false (or never) or auto (or true), in which case colors are used only when the error output goes to a terminal. If unset, then the value of color.ui is used (auto by default).

color.transport.rejected

Use customized color when a push was rejected.

color.ui

This variable determines the default value for variables such as color.diff and color.grep that control the use of color per command family. Its scope will expand as more commands learn configuration to set a default for the --color option. Set it to false or never if you prefer Git commands not to use color unless enabled explicitly with some other configuration or the --color option. Set it to always if you want all output not intended for machine consumption to use color, to true or auto (this is the default since Git 1.8.4) if you want such output to use color when written to the terminal.

column.ui

Specify whether supported commands should output in columns. This variable consists of a list of tokens separated by spaces or commas:

These options control when the feature should be enabled (defaults to never):

always

always show in columns

never

never show in columns

auto

show in columns if the output is to the terminal

These options control layout (defaults to column). Setting any of these implies always if none of always, never, or auto are specified.

column

fill columns before rows

row

fill rows before columns

plain

show in one column

Finally, these options can be combined with a layout option (defaults to nodense):

dense

make unequal size columns to utilize more space

nodense

make equal size columns

column.branch

Specify whether to output branch listing in git branch in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.clean

Specify the layout when listing items in git clean -i, which always shows files and directories in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.status

Specify whether to output untracked files in git status in columns. See column.ui for details.

column.tag

Specify whether to output tag listings in git tag in columns. See column.ui for details.

commit.cleanup

This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. See git-commit[1] for details. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).

commit.gpgSign

A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.

commit.status

A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.

commit.template

Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.

commit.verbose

A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit. See git-commit[1] for details.

commitGraph.generationVersion

Specifies the type of generation number version to use when writing or reading the commit-graph file. If version 1 is specified, then the corrected commit dates will not be written or read. Defaults to 2.

commitGraph.maxNewFilters

Specifies the default value for the --max-new-filters option of git commit-graph write (c.f., git-commit-graph[1]).

commitGraph.changedPaths

If true, then git commit-graph write will compute and write changed-path Bloom filters by default, equivalent to passing --changed-paths. If false or unset, changed-paths Bloom filters will be written during git commit-graph write only if the filters already exist in the current commit-graph file. This matches the default behavior of git commit-graph write without any --[no-]changed-paths option. To rewrite a commit-graph file without any filters, use the --no-changed-paths option. Command-line option --[no-]changed-paths always takes precedence over this configuration. Defaults to unset.

commitGraph.readChangedPaths

Deprecated. Equivalent to commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=-1 if true, and commitGraph.changedPathsVersion=0 if false. (If commitGraph.changedPathVersion is also set, commitGraph.changedPathsVersion takes precedence.)

commitGraph.changedPathsVersion

Specifies the version of the changed-path Bloom filters that Git will read and write. May be -1, 0, 1, or 2. Note that values greater than 1 may be incompatible with older versions of Git which do not yet understand those versions. Use caution when operating in a mixed-version environment.

Defaults to -1.

If -1, Git will use the version of the changed-path Bloom filters in the repository, defaulting to 1 if there are none.

If 0, Git will not read any Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters when instructed to write.

If 1, Git will only read version 1 Bloom filters, and will write version 1 Bloom filters.

If 2, Git will only read version 2 Bloom filters, and will write version 2 Bloom filters.

See git-commit-graph[1] for more information.

completion.commands

This is only used by git-completion.bash to add or remove commands from the list of completed commands. Normally only porcelain commands and a few select others are completed. You can add more commands, separated by space, in this variable. Prefixing the command with - will remove it from the existing list.

core.fileMode

Tells Git if the executable bit of files in the working tree is to be honored.

Some filesystems lose the executable bit when a file that is marked as executable is checked out, or checks out a non-executable file with executable bit on. git-clone[1] or git-init[1] probe the filesystem to see if it handles the executable bit correctly and this variable is automatically set as necessary.

A repository, however, may be on a filesystem that handles the filemode correctly, and this variable is set to true when created, but later may be made accessible from another environment that loses the filemode (e.g. exporting ext4 via CIFS mount, visiting a Cygwin created repository with Git for Windows or Eclipse). In such a case it may be necessary to set this variable to false. See git-update-index[1].

The default is true (when core.filemode is not specified in the config file).

core.hideDotFiles

(Windows-only) If true, mark newly-created directories and files whose name starts with a dot as hidden. If dotGitOnly, only the .git/ directory is hidden, but no other files starting with a dot. The default mode is dotGitOnly.

core.ignoreCase

Internal variable which enables various workarounds to enable Git to work better on filesystems that are not case sensitive, like APFS, HFS+, FAT, NTFS, etc. For example, if a directory listing finds "makefile" when Git expects "Makefile", Git will assume it is really the same file, and continue to remember it as "Makefile".

The default is false, except git-clone[1] or git-init[1] will probe and set core.ignoreCase true if appropriate when the repository is created.

Git relies on the proper configuration of this variable for your operating and file system. Modifying this value may result in unexpected behavior.

core.precomposeUnicode

This option is only used by Mac OS implementation of Git. When core.precomposeUnicode=true, Git reverts the unicode decomposition of filenames done by Mac OS. This is useful when sharing a repository between Mac OS and Linux or Windows. (Git for Windows 1.7.10 or higher is needed, or Git under cygwin 1.7). When false, file names are handled fully transparent by Git, which is backward compatible with older versions of Git.

core.protectHFS

If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would be considered equivalent to .git on an HFS+ filesystem. Defaults to true on Mac OS, and false elsewhere.

core.protectNTFS

If set to true, do not allow checkout of paths that would cause problems with the NTFS filesystem, e.g. conflict with 8.3 "short" names. Defaults to true on Windows, and false elsewhere.

core.fsmonitor

If set to true, enable the built-in file system monitor daemon for this working directory (git-fsmonitor--daemon[1]).

Like hook-based file system monitors, the built-in file system monitor can speed up Git commands that need to refresh the Git index (e.g. git status) in a working directory with many files. The built-in monitor eliminates the need to install and maintain an external third-party tool.

The built-in file system monitor is currently available only on a limited set of supported platforms. Currently, this includes Windows and MacOS.

Otherwise, this variable contains the pathname of the "fsmonitor" hook command.

This hook command is used to identify all files that may have changed since the requested date/time. This information is used to speed up git by avoiding unnecessary scanning of files that have not changed.

See the "fsmonitor-watchman" section of githooks[5].

Note that if you concurrently use multiple versions of Git, such as one version on the command line and another version in an IDE tool, that the definition of core.fsmonitor was extended to allow boolean values in addition to hook pathnames. Git versions 2.35.1 and prior will not understand the boolean values and will consider the "true" or "false" values as hook pathnames to be invoked. Git versions 2.26 thru 2.35.1 default to hook protocol V2 and will fall back to no fsmonitor (full scan). Git versions prior to 2.26 default to hook protocol V1 and will silently assume there were no changes to report (no scan), so status commands may report incomplete results. For this reason, it is best to upgrade all of your Git versions before using the built-in file system monitor.

core.fsmonitorHookVersion

Sets the protocol version to be used when invoking the "fsmonitor" hook.

There are currently versions 1 and 2. When this is not set, version 2 will be tried first and if it fails then version 1 will be tried. Version 1 uses a timestamp as input to determine which files have changes since that time but some monitors like Watchman have race conditions when used with a timestamp. Version 2 uses an opaque string so that the monitor can return something that can be used to determine what files have changed without race conditions.

core.trustctime

If false, the ctime differences between the index and the working tree are ignored; useful when the inode change time is regularly modified by something outside Git (file system crawlers and some backup systems). See git-update-index[1]. True by default.

core.splitIndex

If true, the split-index feature of the index will be used. See git-update-index[1]. False by default.

core.untrackedCache

Determines what to do about the untracked cache feature of the index. It will be kept, if this variable is unset or set to keep. It will automatically be added if set to true. And it will automatically be removed, if set to false. Before setting it to true, you should check that mtime is working properly on your system. See git-update-index[1]. keep by default, unless feature.manyFiles is enabled which sets this setting to true by default.

core.checkStat

When missing or is set to default, many fields in the stat structure are checked to detect if a file has been modified since Git looked at it. When this configuration variable is set to minimal, sub-second part of mtime and ctime, the uid and gid of the owner of the file, the inode number (and the device number, if Git was compiled to use it), are excluded from the check among these fields, leaving only the whole-second part of mtime (and ctime, if core.trustCtime is set) and the filesize to be checked.

There are implementations of Git that do not leave usable values in some fields (e.g. JGit); by excluding these fields from the comparison, the minimal mode may help interoperability when the same repository is used by these other systems at the same time.

core.quotePath

Commands that output paths (e.g. ls-files, diff), will quote "unusual" characters in the pathname by enclosing the pathname in double-quotes and escaping those characters with backslashes in the same way C escapes control characters (e.g. \t for TAB, \n for LF, \\ for backslash) or bytes with values larger than 0x80 (e.g. octal \302\265 for "micro" in UTF-8). If this variable is set to false, bytes higher than 0x80 are not considered "unusual" any more. Double-quotes, backslash and control characters are always escaped regardless of the setting of this variable. A simple space character is not considered "unusual". Many commands can output pathnames completely verbatim using the -z option. The default value is true.

core.eol

Sets the line ending type to use in the working directory for files that are marked as text (either by having the text attribute set, or by having text=auto and Git auto-detecting the contents as text). Alternatives are lf, crlf and native, which uses the platform’s native line ending. The default value is native. See gitattributes[5] for more information on end-of-line conversion. Note that this value is ignored if core.autocrlf is set to true or input.

core.safecrlf

If true, makes Git check if converting CRLF is reversible when end-of-line conversion is active. Git will verify if a command modifies a file in the work tree either directly or indirectly. For example, committing a file followed by checking out the same file should yield the original file in the work tree. If this is not the case for the current setting of core.autocrlf, Git will reject the file. The variable can be set to "warn", in which case Git will only warn about an irreversible conversion but continue the operation.

CRLF conversion bears a slight chance of corrupting data. When it is enabled, Git will convert CRLF to LF during commit and LF to CRLF during checkout. A file that contains a mixture of LF and CRLF before the commit cannot be recreated by Git. For text files this is the right thing to do: it corrects line endings such that we have only LF line endings in the repository. But for binary files that are accidentally classified as text the conversion can corrupt data.

If you recognize such corruption early you can easily fix it by setting the conversion type explicitly in .gitattributes. Right after committing you still have the original file in your work tree and this file is not yet corrupted. You can explicitly tell Git that this file is binary and Git will handle the file appropriately.

Unfortunately, the desired effect of cleaning up text files with mixed line endings and the undesired effect of corrupting binary files cannot be distinguished. In both cases CRLFs are removed in an irreversible way. For text files this is the right thing to do because CRLFs are line endings, while for binary files converting CRLFs corrupts data.

Note, this safety check does not mean that a checkout will generate a file identical to the original file for a different setting of core.eol and core.autocrlf, but only for the current one. For example, a text file with LF would be accepted with core.eol=lf and could later be checked out with core.eol=crlf, in which case the resulting file would contain CRLF, although the original file contained LF. However, in both work trees the line endings would be consistent, that is either all LF or all CRLF, but never mixed. A file with mixed line endings would be reported by the core.safecrlf mechanism.

core.autocrlf

Setting this variable to "true" is the same as setting the text attribute to "auto" on all files and core.eol to "crlf". Set to true if you want to have CRLF line endings in your working directory and the repository has LF line endings. This variable can be set to input, in which case no output conversion is performed.

core.checkRoundtripEncoding

A comma and/or whitespace separated list of encodings that Git performs UTF-8 round trip checks on if they are used in an working-tree-encoding attribute (see gitattributes[5]). The default value is SHIFT-JIS.

core.symlinks

If false, symbolic links are checked out as small plain files that contain the link text. git-update-index[1] and git-add[1] will not change the recorded type to regular file. Useful on filesystems like FAT that do not support symbolic links.

The default is true, except git-clone[1] or git-init[1] will probe and set core.symlinks false if appropriate when the repository is created.

core.gitProxy

A "proxy command" to execute (as command host port) instead of establishing direct connection to the remote server when using the Git protocol for fetching. If the variable value is in the "COMMAND for DOMAIN" format, the command is applied only on hostnames ending with the specified domain string. This variable may be set multiple times and is matched in the given order; the first match wins.

Can be overridden by the GIT_PROXY_COMMAND environment variable (which always applies universally, without the special "for" handling).

The special string none can be used as the proxy command to specify that no proxy be used for a given domain pattern. This is useful for excluding servers inside a firewall from proxy use, while defaulting to a common proxy for external domains.

core.sshCommand

If this variable is set, git fetch and git push will use the specified command instead of ssh when they need to connect to a remote system. The command is in the same form as the GIT_SSH_COMMAND environment variable and is overridden when the environment variable is set.

core.ignoreStat

If true, Git will avoid using lstat() calls to detect if files have changed by setting the "assume-unchanged" bit for those tracked files which it has updated identically in both the index and working tree.

When files are modified outside of Git, the user will need to stage the modified files explicitly (e.g. see Examples section in git-update-index[1]). Git will not normally detect changes to those files.

This is useful on systems where lstat() calls are very slow, such as CIFS/Microsoft Windows.

False by default.

core.preferSymlinkRefs

Instead of the default "symref" format for HEAD and other symbolic reference files, use symbolic links. This is sometimes needed to work with old scripts that expect HEAD to be a symbolic link.

This configuration is deprecated and will be removed in Git 3.0. Symbolic refs will always be written as textual symrefs.

core.alternateRefsCommand

When advertising tips of available history from an alternate, use the shell to execute the specified command instead of git-for-each-ref[1]. The first argument is the absolute path of the alternate. Output must contain one hex object id per line (i.e., the same as produced by git for-each-ref --format='%(objectname)).

Note that you cannot generally put git for-each-ref directly into the config value, as it does not take a repository path as an argument (but you can wrap the command above in a shell script).

core.alternateRefsPrefixes

When listing references from an alternate, list only references that begin with the given prefix. Prefixes match as if they were given as arguments to git-for-each-ref[1]. To list multiple prefixes, separate them with whitespace. If core.alternateRefsCommand is set, setting core.alternateRefsPrefixes has no effect.

core.bare

If true this repository is assumed to be bare and has no working directory associated with it. If this is the case a number of commands that require a working directory will be disabled, such as git-add[1] or git-merge[1].

This setting is automatically guessed by git-clone[1] or git-init[1] when the repository was created. By default a repository that ends in "/.git" is assumed to be not bare (bare = false), while all other repositories are assumed to be bare (bare = true).

core.worktree

Set the path to the root of the working tree. If GIT_COMMON_DIR environment variable is set, core.worktree is ignored and not used for determining the root of working tree. This can be overridden by the GIT_WORK_TREE environment variable and the --work-tree command-line option. The value can be an absolute path or relative to the path to the .git directory, which is either specified by --git-dir or GIT_DIR, or automatically discovered. If --git-dir or GIT_DIR is specified but none of --work-tree, GIT_WORK_TREE and core.worktree is specified, the current working directory is regarded as the top level of your working tree.

Note that this variable is honored even when set in a configuration file in a ".git" subdirectory of a directory and its value differs from the latter directory (e.g. "/path/to/.git/config" has core.worktree set to "/different/path"), which is most likely a misconfiguration. Running Git commands in the "/path/to" directory will still use "/different/path" as the root of the work tree and can cause confusion unless you know what you are doing (e.g. you are creating a read-only snapshot of the same index to a location different from the repository’s usual working tree).

core.lockfilePid

If true, Git will create a PID file alongside lock files. When a lock acquisition fails and a PID file exists, Git can provide additional diagnostic information about the process holding the lock, including whether it is still running. Defaults to false.

The PID file is named by inserting ~pid before the .lock suffix. For example, if the lock file is index.lock, the PID file will be index~pid.lock. The file contains a single line in the format pid <value> followed by a newline.

core.logAllRefUpdates

Enable the reflog. Updates to a ref <ref> is logged to the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>", by appending the new and old SHA-1, the date/time and the reason of the update, but only when the file exists. If this configuration variable is set to true, missing "$GIT_DIR/logs/<ref>" file is automatically created for branch heads (i.e. under refs/heads/), remote refs (i.e. under refs/remotes/), note refs (i.e. under refs/notes/), and the symbolic ref HEAD. If it is set to always, then a missing reflog is automatically created for any ref under refs/.

This information can be used to determine what commit was the tip of a branch "2 days ago".

This value is true by default in a repository that has a working directory associated with it, and false by default in a bare repository.

core.repositoryFormatVersion

Internal variable identifying the repository format and layout version. See gitrepository-layout[5].

core.sharedRepository

When group (or true), the repository is made shareable between several users in a group (making sure all the files and objects are group-writable). When all (or world or everybody), the repository will be readable by all users, additionally to being group-shareable. When umask (or false), Git will use permissions reported by umask(2). When 0xxx, where 0xxx is an octal number, files in the repository will have this mode value. 0xxx will override user’s umask value (whereas the other options will only override requested parts of the user’s umask value). Examples: 0660 will make the repo read/write-able for the owner and group, but inaccessible to others (equivalent to group unless umask is e.g. 0022). 0640 is a repository that is group-readable but not group-writable. See git-init[1]. False by default.

core.warnAmbiguousRefs

If true, Git will warn you if the ref name you passed it is ambiguous and might match multiple refs in the repository. True by default.

core.compression

An integer -1..9, indicating a default compression level. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If set, this provides a default to other compression variables, such as core.looseCompression and pack.compression.

core.looseCompression

An integer -1..9, indicating the compression level for objects that are not in a pack file. -1 is the zlib default. 0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest. If not set, defaults to core.compression. If that is not set, defaults to 1 (best speed).

core.packedGitWindowSize

Number of bytes of a pack file to map into memory in a single mapping operation. Larger window sizes may allow your system to process a smaller number of large pack files more quickly. Smaller window sizes will negatively affect performance due to increased calls to the operating system’s memory manager, but may improve performance when accessing a large number of large pack files.

Default is 1 MiB if NO_MMAP was set at compile time, otherwise 32 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 1 GiB on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.packedGitLimit

Maximum number of bytes to map simultaneously into memory from pack files. If Git needs to access more than this many bytes at once to complete an operation it will unmap existing regions to reclaim virtual address space within the process.

Default is 256 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 32 TiB (effectively unlimited) on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.deltaBaseCacheLimit

Maximum number of bytes per thread to reserve for caching base objects that may be referenced by multiple deltified objects. By storing the entire decompressed base objects in a cache Git is able to avoid unpacking and decompressing frequently used base objects multiple times.

Default is 96 MiB on all platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

core.bigFileThreshold

The size of files considered "big", which as discussed below changes the behavior of numerous git commands, as well as how such files are stored within the repository. The default is 512 MiB. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

Files above the configured limit will be:

• Stored deflated in packfiles, without attempting delta compression.

  The default limit is primarily set with this use-case in mind. With it, most projects will have their source code and other text files delta compressed, but not larger binary media files.

  Storing large files without delta compression avoids excessive memory usage, at the slight expense of increased disk usage.

• Will be treated as if they were labeled "binary" (see gitattributes[5]). e.g. git-log[1] and git-diff[1] will not compute diffs for files above this limit.

• Will generally be streamed when written, which avoids excessive memory usage, at the cost of some fixed overhead. Commands that make use of this include git-archive[1], git-fast-import[1], git-index-pack[1], git-unpack-objects[1] and git-fsck[1].

core.excludesFile

Specifies the pathname to the file that contains patterns to describe paths that are not meant to be tracked, in addition to .gitignore (per-directory) and .git/info/exclude. Defaults to $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/ignore. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/ignore is used instead. See gitignore[5].

core.askPass

Some commands (e.g. svn and http interfaces) that interactively ask for a password can be told to use an external program given via the value of this variable. Can be overridden by the GIT_ASKPASS environment variable. If not set, fall back to the value of the SSH_ASKPASS environment variable or, failing that, a simple password prompt. The external program shall be given a suitable prompt as command-line argument and write the password on its STDOUT.

core.attributesFile

Specifies the pathname to the file that contains attributes (see gitattributes[5]), in addition to .gitattributes (per-directory) and .git/info/attributes. Its default value is $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/git/attributes. If $XDG_CONFIG_HOME is either not set or empty, $HOME/.config/git/attributes is used instead.

core.hooksPath

By default Git will look for your hooks in the $GIT_DIR/hooks directory. Set this to different path, e.g. /etc/git/hooks, and Git will try to find your hooks in that directory, e.g. /etc/git/hooks/pre-receive instead of in $GIT_DIR/hooks/pre-receive.

The path can be either absolute or relative. A relative path is taken as relative to the directory where the hooks are run (see the "DESCRIPTION" section of githooks[5]).

This configuration variable is useful in cases where you’d like to centrally configure your Git hooks instead of configuring them on a per-repository basis, or as a more flexible and centralized alternative to having an init.templateDir where you’ve changed default hooks.

You can also disable all hooks entirely by setting core.hooksPath to /dev/null. This is usually only advisable for expert users and on a per-command basis using configuration parameters of the form git -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null ....

core.editor

Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages by launching an editor use the value of this variable when it is set, and the environment variable GIT_EDITOR is not set. See git-var[1].

core.commentChar

core.commentString

Commands such as commit and tag that let you edit messages consider a line that begins with this character commented, and removes them after the editor returns (default #).

If set to "auto", git-commit will select a character that is not the beginning character of any line in existing commit messages. Support for this value is deprecated and will be removed in Git 3.0 due to the following limitations:

• It is incompatible with adding comments in a commit message template. This includes the conflicts comments added to the commit message by cherry-pick, merge, rebase and revert.

• It is incompatible with adding comments to the commit message in the prepare-commit-msg hook.

• It is incompatible with the fixup and squash commands when rebasing,

• It is not respected by git notes

Note that these two variables are aliases of each other, and in modern versions of Git you are free to use a string (e.g., // or ⁑⁕⁑) with commentChar. Versions of Git prior to v2.45.0 will ignore commentString but will reject a value of commentChar that consists of more than a single ASCII byte. If you plan to use your config with older and newer versions of Git, you may want to specify both:

[core]
# single character for older versions
commentChar = "#"
# string for newer versions (which will override commentChar
# because it comes later in the file)
commentString = "//"

core.filesRefLockTimeout

The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock an individual reference. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 100 (i.e., retry for 100ms).

core.packedRefsTimeout

The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock the packed-refs file. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1 second).

core.configLockTimeout

The length of time, in milliseconds, to retry when trying to lock a configuration file for writing. Value 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1 second). This is read from the configuration that is already on disk before the lock is taken, so it can be set persistently like any other option.

core.pager

Text viewer for use by Git commands (e.g., less). The value is meant to be interpreted by the shell. The order of preference is the $GIT_PAGER environment variable, then core.pager configuration, then $PAGER, and then the default chosen at compile time (usually less).

When the LESS environment variable is unset, Git sets it to FRX (if LESS environment variable is set, Git does not change it at all). If you want to selectively override Git’s default setting for LESS, you can set core.pager to e.g. less -S. This will be passed to the shell by Git, which will translate the final command to LESS=FRX less -S. The environment does not set the S option but the command line does, instructing less to truncate long lines. Similarly, setting core.pager to less -+F will deactivate the F option specified by the environment from the command-line, deactivating the "quit if one screen" behavior of less. One can specifically activate some flags for particular commands: for example, setting pager.blame to less -S enables line truncation only for git blame.

Likewise, when the LV environment variable is unset, Git sets it to -c. You can override this setting by exporting LV with another value or setting core.pager to lv +c.

core.whitespace

A comma separated list of common whitespace problems to notice. git diff will use color.diff.whitespace to highlight them, and git apply --whitespace=error will consider them as errors. You can prefix - to disable any of them (e.g. -trailing-space):

• blank-at-eol treats trailing whitespaces at the end of the line as an error (enabled by default).

• space-before-tab treats a space character that appears immediately before a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (enabled by default).

• indent-with-non-tab treats a line that is indented with space characters instead of the equivalent tabs as an error (not enabled by default).

• tab-in-indent treats a tab character in the initial indent part of the line as an error (not enabled by default).

• blank-at-eof treats blank lines added at the end of file as an error (enabled by default).

• trailing-space is a short-hand to cover both blank-at-eol and blank-at-eof.

• cr-at-eol treats a carriage-return at the end of line as part of the line terminator, i.e. with it, trailing-space does not trigger if the character before such a carriage-return is not a whitespace (not enabled by default).

• incomplete-line treats the last line of a file that is missing the newline at the end as an error (not enabled by default).

• tabwidth=<n> tells how many character positions a tab occupies; this is relevant for indent-with-non-tab and when Git fixes tab-in-indent errors. The default tab width is 8. Allowed values are 1 to 63.

core.fsync

A comma-separated list of components of the repository that should be hardened via the core.fsyncMethod when created or modified. You can disable hardening of any component by prefixing it with a -. Items that are not hardened may be lost in the event of an unclean system shutdown. Unless you have special requirements, it is recommended that you leave this option empty or pick one of committed, added, or all.

When this configuration is encountered, the set of components starts with the platform default value, disabled components are removed, and additional components are added. none resets the state so that the platform default is ignored.

The empty string resets the fsync configuration to the platform default. The default on most platforms is equivalent to core.fsync=committed,-loose-object, which has good performance, but risks losing recent work in the event of an unclean system shutdown.

• none clears the set of fsynced components.

• loose-object hardens objects added to the repo in loose-object form.

• pack hardens objects added to the repo in packfile form.

• pack-metadata hardens packfile bitmaps and indexes.

• commit-graph hardens the commit-graph file.

• index hardens the index when it is modified.

• objects is an aggregate option that is equivalent to loose-object,pack.

• reference hardens references modified in the repo.

• derived-metadata is an aggregate option that is equivalent to pack-metadata,commit-graph.

• committed is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to objects. This mode sacrifices some performance to ensure that work that is committed to the repository with git commit or similar commands is hardened.

• added is an aggregate option that is currently equivalent to committed,index. This mode sacrifices additional performance to ensure that the results of commands like git add and similar operations are hardened.

• all is an aggregate option that syncs all individual components above.

core.fsyncMethod

A value indicating the strategy Git will use to harden repository data using fsync and related primitives.

• fsync uses the fsync() system call or platform equivalents.

• writeout-only issues pagecache writeback requests, but depending on the filesystem and storage hardware, data added to the repository may not be durable in the event of a system crash. This is the default mode on macOS.

• batch enables a mode that uses writeout-only flushes to stage multiple updates in the disk writeback cache and then does a single full fsync of a dummy file to trigger the disk cache flush at the end of the operation.

  Currently batch mode only applies to loose-object files. Other repository data is made durable as if fsync was specified. This mode is expected to be as safe as fsync on macOS for repos stored on HFS+ or APFS filesystems and on Windows for repos stored on NTFS or ReFS filesystems.

core.fsyncObjectFiles

This boolean will enable fsync() when writing object files. This setting is deprecated. Use core.fsync instead.

This setting affects data added to the Git repository in loose-object form. When set to true, Git will issue an fsync or similar system call to flush caches so that loose-objects remain consistent in the face of a unclean system shutdown.

core.preloadIndex

Enable parallel index preload for operations like git diff

This can speed up operations like git diff and git status especially on filesystems like NFS that have weak caching semantics and thus relatively high IO latencies. When enabled, Git will do the index comparison to the filesystem data in parallel, allowing overlapping IO’s. Defaults to true.

core.unsetenvvars

Windows-only: comma-separated list of environment variables' names that need to be unset before spawning any other process. Defaults to PERL5LIB to account for the fact that Git for Windows insists on using its own Perl interpreter.

core.createObject

You can set this to link, in which case a hardlink followed by a delete of the source are used to make sure that object creation will not overwrite existing objects.

On some file system/operating system combinations, this is unreliable. Set this config setting to rename there; however, this will remove the check that makes sure that existing object files will not get overwritten.

core.notesRef

When showing commit messages, also show notes which are stored in the given ref. The ref must be fully qualified. If the given ref does not exist, it is not an error but means that no notes should be printed.

This setting defaults to "refs/notes/commits", and it can be overridden by the GIT_NOTES_REF environment variable. See git-notes[1].

core.commitGraph

If true, then git will read the commit-graph file (if it exists) to parse the graph structure of commits. Defaults to true. See git-commit-graph[1] for more information.

core.useReplaceRefs

If set to false, behave as if the --no-replace-objects option was given on the command line. See git[1] and git-replace[1] for more information.

core.multiPackIndex

Use the multi-pack-index file to track multiple packfiles using a single index. See git-multi-pack-index[1] for more information. Defaults to true.

core.sparseCheckout

Enable "sparse checkout" feature. See git-sparse-checkout[1] for more information.

core.sparseCheckoutCone

Enables the "cone mode" of the sparse checkout feature. When the sparse-checkout file contains a limited set of patterns, this mode provides significant performance advantages. The "non-cone mode" can be requested to allow specifying more flexible patterns by setting this variable to false. See git-sparse-checkout[1] for more information.

core.abbrev

Set the length object names are abbreviated to. If unspecified or set to "auto", an appropriate value is computed based on the approximate number of packed objects in your repository, which hopefully is enough for abbreviated object names to stay unique for some time. If set to "no", no abbreviation is made and the object names are shown in their full length. The minimum length is 4.

core.maxTreeDepth

The maximum depth Git is willing to recurse while traversing a tree (e.g., "a/b/cde/f" has a depth of 4). This is a fail-safe to allow Git to abort cleanly, and should not generally need to be adjusted. When Git is compiled with MSVC, the default is 512. Otherwise, the default is 2048.

credential.helper

Specify an external helper to be called when a username or password credential is needed; the helper may consult external storage to avoid prompting the user for the credentials. This is normally the name of a credential helper with possible arguments, but may also be an absolute path with arguments or, if preceded by !, shell commands.

Note that multiple helpers may be defined. See gitcredentials[7] for details and examples.

credential.interactive

By default, Git and any configured credential helpers will ask for user input when new credentials are required. Many of these helpers will succeed based on stored credentials if those credentials are still valid. To avoid the possibility of user interactivity from Git, set credential.interactive=false. Some credential helpers respect this option as well.

credential.useHttpPath

When acquiring credentials, consider the "path" component of an http or https URL to be important. Defaults to false. See gitcredentials[7] for more information.

credential.sanitizePrompt

By default, user names and hosts that are shown as part of the password prompt are not allowed to contain control characters (they will be URL-encoded by default). Configure this setting to false to override that behavior.

credential.protectProtocol

By default, Carriage Return characters are not allowed in the protocol that is used when Git talks to a credential helper. This setting allows users to override this default.

credential.username

If no username is set for a network authentication, use this username by default. See credential.<context>.* below, and gitcredentials[7].

credential.<url>.*

Any of the credential.* options above can be applied selectively to some credentials. For example, "credential.https://example.com.username" would set the default username only for https connections to example.com. See gitcredentials[7] for details on how URLs are matched.

credentialCache.ignoreSIGHUP

Tell git-credential-cache—​daemon to ignore SIGHUP, instead of quitting.

credentialStore.lockTimeoutMS

The length of time, in milliseconds, for git-credential-store to retry when trying to lock the credentials file. A value of 0 means not to retry at all; -1 means to try indefinitely. Default is 1000 (i.e., retry for 1s).

diff.autoRefreshIndex

When using git diff to compare with work tree files, do not consider stat-only changes as changed. Instead, silently run git update-index --refresh to update the cached stat information for paths whose contents in the work tree match the contents in the index. This option defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files.

diff.dirstat

A comma separated list of --dirstat parameters specifying the default behavior of the --dirstat option to git-diff[1] and friends. The defaults can be overridden on the command line (using --dirstat=<param>,...). The fallback defaults (when not changed by diff.dirstat) are changes,noncumulative,3. The following parameters are available:

changes

Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the lines that have been removed from the source, or added to the destination. This ignores the amount of pure code movements within a file. In other words, rearranging lines in a file is not counted as much as other changes. This is the default behavior when no parameter is given.

lines

Compute the dirstat numbers by doing the regular line-based diff analysis, and summing the removed/added line counts. (For binary files, count 64-byte chunks instead, since binary files have no natural concept of lines). This is a more expensive --dirstat behavior than the changes behavior, but it does count rearranged lines within a file as much as other changes. The resulting output is consistent with what you get from the other --*stat options.

files

Compute the dirstat numbers by counting the number of files changed. Each changed file counts equally in the dirstat analysis. This is the computationally cheapest --dirstat behavior, since it does not have to look at the file contents at all.

cumulative

Count changes in a child directory for the parent directory as well. Note that when using cumulative, the sum of the percentages reported may exceed 100%. The default (non-cumulative) behavior can be specified with the noncumulative parameter.

<limit>

An integer parameter specifies a cut-off percent (3% by default). Directories contributing less than this percentage of the changes are not shown in the output.

Example: The following will count changed files, while ignoring directories with less than 10% of the total amount of changed files, and accumulating child directory counts in the parent directories: files,10,cumulative.

diff.statNameWidth

Limit the width of the filename part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.

diff.statGraphWidth

Limit the width of the graph part in --stat output. If set, applies to all commands generating --stat output except format-patch.

diff.context

Generate diffs with <n> lines of context instead of the default of 3. This value is overridden by the -U option.

diff.interHunkContext

Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified number of lines, thereby fusing the hunks that are close to each other. This value serves as the default for the --inter-hunk-context command line option.

diff.external

If this config variable is set, diff generation is not performed using the internal diff machinery, but using the given command. Can be overridden with the GIT_EXTERNAL_DIFF environment variable. The command is called with parameters as described under "git Diffs" in git[1]. Note: if you want to use an external diff program only on a subset of your files, you might want to use gitattributes[5] instead.

diff.trustExitCode

If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.external command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.

diff.ignoreSubmodules

Sets the default value of --ignore-submodules. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain, and not lower level diff commands such as git diff-files. git checkout and git switch also honor this setting when reporting uncommitted changes. Setting it to all disables the submodule summary normally shown by git commit and git status when status.submoduleSummary is set unless it is overridden by using the --ignore-submodules command-line option. The git submodule commands are not affected by this setting. By default this is set to untracked so that any untracked submodules are ignored.

diff.mnemonicPrefix

If set, git diff uses a prefix pair that is different from the standard a/ and b/ depending on what is being compared. When this configuration is in effect, reverse diff output also swaps the order of the prefixes:

git diff

compares the (i)ndex and the (w)ork tree;

git diff HEAD

compares a (c)ommit and the (w)ork tree;

git diff --cached

compares a (c)ommit and the (i)ndex;

git diff HEAD:<file1> <file2>

compares an (o)bject and a (w)ork tree entity;

git diff --no-index <a> <b>

compares two non-git things <a> and <b>.

diff.noPrefix

If set, git diff does not show any source or destination prefix.

diff.srcPrefix

If set, git diff uses this source prefix. Defaults to a/.

diff.dstPrefix

If set, git diff uses this destination prefix. Defaults to b/.

diff.relative

If set to true, git diff does not show changes outside of the directory and show pathnames relative to the current directory.

diff.orderFile

File indicating how to order files within a diff. See the -O option to git-diff[1] for details. If diff.orderFile is a relative pathname, it is treated as relative to the top of the working tree.

diff.renameLimit

The number of files to consider in the exhaustive portion of copy/rename detection; equivalent to the git diff option -l. If not set, the default value is currently 1000. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.

diff.renames

Whether and how Git detects renames. If set to false, rename detection is disabled. If set to true, basic rename detection is enabled. If set to copies or copy, Git will detect copies, as well. Defaults to true. Note that this affects only git diff Porcelain like git-diff[1] and git-log[1], and not lower level commands such as git-diff-files[1].

diff.suppressBlankEmpty

A boolean to inhibit the standard behavior of printing a space before each empty output line. Defaults to false.

diff.submodule

Specify the format in which differences in submodules are shown. The short format just shows the names of the commits at the beginning and end of the range. The log format lists the commits in the range like git-submodule[1] summary does. The diff format shows an inline diff of the changed contents of the submodule. Defaults to short.

diff.wordRegex

A POSIX Extended Regular Expression used to determine what is a "word" when performing word-by-word difference calculations. Character sequences that match the regular expression are "words", all other characters are ignorable whitespace.

diff.<driver>.command

The custom diff driver command. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.trustExitCode

If this boolean value is set to true then the diff.<driver>.command command is expected to return exit code 0 if it considers the input files to be equal or 1 if it considers them to be different, like diff(1). If it is set to false, which is the default, then the command is expected to return exit code 0 regardless of equality. Any other exit code causes Git to report a fatal error.

diff.<driver>.xfuncname

The regular expression that the diff driver should use to recognize the hunk header. A built-in pattern may also be used. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.binary

Set this option to true to make the diff driver treat files as binary. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.textconv

The command that the diff driver should call to generate the text-converted version of a file. The result of the conversion is used to generate a human-readable diff. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.wordRegex

The regular expression that the diff driver should use to split words in a line. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.<driver>.cachetextconv

Set this option to true to make the diff driver cache the text conversion outputs. See gitattributes[5] for details.

diff.indentHeuristic

Set this option to false to disable the default heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.

diff.algorithm

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

default

myers

The basic greedy diff algorithm. Currently, this is the default.

minimal

Spend extra time to make sure the smallest possible diff is produced.

patience

Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.

histogram

This algorithm extends the patience algorithm to "support low-occurrence common elements".

diff.wsErrorHighlight

Highlight whitespace errors in the context, old or new lines of the diff. Multiple values are separated by comma, none resets previous values, default reset the list to new and all is a shorthand for old,new,context. The whitespace errors are colored with color.diff.whitespace. The command line option --ws-error-highlight=<kind> overrides this setting.

diff.colorMoved

If set to either a valid <mode> or a true value, moved lines in a diff are colored differently. For details of valid modes see --color-moved in git-diff[1]. If simply set to true the default color mode will be used. When set to false, moved lines are not colored.

diff.colorMovedWS

When moved lines are colored using e.g. the diff.colorMoved setting, this option controls the mode how spaces are treated. For details of valid modes see --color-moved-ws in git-diff[1].

diff.tool

Controls which diff tool is used by git-difftool[1]. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.tool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<tool>.cmd variable is defined.

diff.guitool

Controls which diff tool is used by git-difftool[1] when the -g/--gui flag is specified. This variable overrides the value configured in merge.guitool. The list below shows the valid built-in values. Any other value is treated as a custom diff tool and requires that a corresponding difftool.<guitool>.cmd variable is defined.

• araxis

• bc

• codecompare

• deltawalker

• diffmerge

• diffuse

• ecmerge

• emerge

• examdiff

• guiffy

• gvimdiff

• kdiff3

• kompare

• meld

• nvimdiff

• opendiff

• p4merge

• smerge

• tkdiff

• vimdiff

• vscode

• winmerge

• xxdiff

difftool.<tool>.cmd

Specify the command to invoke the specified diff tool. The specified command is evaluated in shell with the following variables available: LOCAL is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff pre-image and REMOTE is set to the name of the temporary file containing the contents of the diff post-image.

See the --tool=<tool> option in git-difftool[1] for more details.

difftool.<tool>.path

Override the path for the given tool. This is useful in case your tool is not in the PATH.

difftool.trustExitCode

Exit difftool if the invoked diff tool returns a non-zero exit status.

See the --trust-exit-code option in git-difftool[1] for more details.

difftool.prompt

Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.

difftool.guiDefault

Set true to use the diff.guitool by default (equivalent to specifying the --gui argument), or auto to select diff.guitool or diff.tool depending on the presence of a DISPLAY environment variable value. The default is false, where the --gui argument must be provided explicitly for the diff.guitool to be used.

extensions.*

Unless otherwise stated, is an error to specify an extension if core.repositoryFormatVersion is not 1. See gitrepository-layout[5].

compatObjectFormat

Specify a compatibility hash algorithm to use. The acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. The value specified must be different from the value of extensions.objectFormat. This allows client level interoperability between git repositories whose objectFormat matches this compatObjectFormat. In particular when fully implemented the pushes and pulls from a repository in whose objectFormat matches compatObjectFormat. As well as being able to use oids encoded in compatObjectFormat in addition to oids encoded with objectFormat to locally specify objects.

Note that the functionality enabled by this extension is incomplete and subject to change. It currently exists only to allow development and testing of the underlying feature and is not designed to be enabled by end users.

noop

This extension does not change git’s behavior at all. It is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

noop-v1

This extension does not change git’s behavior at all. It is useful only for testing format-1 compatibility.

objectFormat

Specify the hash algorithm to use. The acceptable values are sha1 and sha256. If not specified, sha1 is assumed.

Note that this setting should only be set by git-init[1] or git-clone[1]. Trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues.

partialClone

When enabled, indicates that the repo was created with a partial clone (or later performed a partial fetch) and that the remote may have omitted sending certain unwanted objects. Such a remote is called a "promisor remote" and it promises that all such omitted objects can be fetched from it in the future.

The value of this key is the name of the promisor remote.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

preciousObjects

If enabled, indicates that objects in the repository MUST NOT be deleted (e.g., by git-prune or git repack -d).

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

refStorage

Specify the ref storage format and a corresponding payload. The value can be either a format name or a URI:

• A format name alone (e.g., reftable or files).

• A URI format <format>://<payload> explicitly specifies both the format and payload (e.g., reftable:///foo/bar).

Supported format names are:

files

for loose files with packed-refs. This is the default.

reftable

for the reftable format.

The payload is passed directly to the reference backend. For the files and reftable backends, this must be a filesystem path where the references will be stored. Defaulting to the commondir when no payload is provided. Relative paths are resolved relative to the $GIT_DIR. Future backends may support other payload schemes, e.g., postgres://127.0.0.1:5432?database=myrepo.

Note that this setting should only be set by git-init[1] or git-clone[1]. Trying to change it after initialization will not work and will produce hard-to-diagnose issues.

relativeWorktrees

If enabled, indicates at least one worktree has been linked with relative paths. Automatically set if a worktree has been created or repaired with either the --relative-paths option or with the worktree.useRelativePaths config set to true.

submodulePathConfig

This extension is for the minority of users who:

• Encounter errors like refusing to create ... in another submodule's git dir due to a number of reasons, like case-insensitive filesystem conflicts when creating modules named foo and Foo.

• Require more flexible submodule layouts, for example due to nested names like foo, foo/bar and foo/baz not supported by the default gitdir mechanism which uses .git/modules/<plain-name> locations, causing further conflicts.

When extensions.submodulePathConfig is enabled, the submodule.<name>.gitdir config becomes the single source of truth for all submodule gitdir paths and is automatically set for all new submodules both during clone and init operations.

Git will error out if a module does not have a corresponding submodule.<name>.gitdir set.

Existing (pre-extension) submodules need to be migrated by adding the missing config entries. This can be done manually, e.g. for each submodule: git config submodule.<name>.gitdir .git/modules/<name>, or via the git submodule--helper migrate-gitdir-configs command which iterates over all submodules and attempts to migrate them.

The extension can be enabled automatically for new repositories by setting init.defaultSubmodulePathConfig to true, for example by running git config --global init.defaultSubmodulePathConfig true.

worktreeConfig

If enabled, then worktrees will load config settings from the $GIT_DIR/config.worktree file in addition to the $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config file. Note that $GIT_COMMON_DIR and $GIT_DIR are the same for the main working tree, while other working trees have $GIT_DIR equal to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/<id>/. The settings in the config.worktree file will override settings from any other config files.

When enabling this extension, you must be careful to move certain values from the common config file to the main working tree’s config.worktree file, if present:

• core.worktree must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.

• If core.bare is true, then it must be moved from $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config to $GIT_COMMON_DIR/config.worktree.

It may also be beneficial to adjust the locations of core.sparseCheckout and core.sparseCheckoutCone depending on your desire for customizable sparse-checkout settings for each worktree. By default, the git sparse-checkout builtin enables this extension, assigns these config values on a per-worktree basis, and uses the $GIT_DIR/info/sparse-checkout file to specify the sparsity for each worktree independently. See git-sparse-checkout[1] for more details.

For historical reasons, this extension is respected regardless of the core.repositoryFormatVersion setting.

fastimport.unpackLimit

If the number of objects imported by git-fast-import[1] is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However, if the number of imported objects equals or exceeds this limit, then the pack will be stored as a pack. Storing the pack from a fast-import can make the import operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

feature.*

The config settings that start with feature. modify the defaults of a group of other config settings. These groups are created by the Git developer community as recommended defaults and are subject to change. In particular, new config options may be added with different defaults.

feature.experimental

Enable config options that are new to Git, and are being considered for future defaults. Config settings included here may be added or removed with each release, including minor version updates. These settings may have unintended interactions since they are so new. Please enable this setting if you are interested in providing feedback on experimental features. The new default values are:

• fetch.negotiationAlgorithm=skipping may improve fetch negotiation times by skipping more commits at a time, reducing the number of round trips.

• pack.useBitmapBoundaryTraversal=true may improve bitmap traversal times by walking fewer objects.

• pack.allowPackReuse=multi may improve the time it takes to create a pack by reusing objects from multiple packs instead of just one.

• pack.usePathWalk may speed up packfile creation and make the packfiles be significantly smaller in the presence of certain filename collisions with Git’s default name-hash.

• init.defaultRefFormat=reftable causes newly initialized repositories to use the reftable format for storing references. This new format solves issues with case-insensitive filesystems, compresses better and performs significantly better with many use cases. Refer to Documentation/technical/reftable.adoc for more information on this new storage format.

feature.manyFiles

Enable config options that optimize for repos with many files in the working directory. With many files, commands such as git status and git checkout may be slow and these new defaults improve performance:

• index.skipHash=true speeds up index writes by not computing a trailing checksum. Note that this will cause Git versions earlier than 2.13.0 to refuse to parse the index and Git versions earlier than 2.40.0 will report a corrupted index during git fsck.

• index.version=4 enables path-prefix compression in the index.

• core.untrackedCache=true enables the untracked cache. This setting assumes that mtime is working on your machine.

fetch.recurseSubmodules

This option controls whether git fetch (and the underlying fetch in git pull) will recursively fetch into populated submodules. This option can be set either to a boolean value or to on-demand. Setting it to a boolean changes the behavior of fetch and pull to recurse unconditionally into submodules when set to true or to not recurse at all when set to false. When set to on-demand, fetch and pull will only recurse into a populated submodule when its superproject retrieves a commit that updates the submodule’s reference. Defaults to on-demand, or to the value of submodule.recurse if set.

fetch.fsckObjects

If it is set to true, git-fetch-pack will check all fetched objects. See transfer.fsckObjects for what’s checked. Defaults to false. If not set, the value of transfer.fsckObjects is used instead.

fetch.fsck.<msg-id>

Acts like fsck.<msg-id>, but is used by git-fetch-pack[1] instead of git-fsck[1]. See the fsck.<msg-id> documentation for details.

fetch.fsck.skipList

Acts like fsck.skipList, but is used by git-fetch-pack[1] instead of git-fsck[1]. See the fsck.skipList documentation for details.

fetch.unpackLimit

If the number of objects fetched over the Git native transfer is below this limit, then the objects will be unpacked into loose object files. However if the number of received objects equals or exceeds this limit then the received pack will be stored as a pack, after adding any missing delta bases. Storing the pack from a push can make the push operation complete faster, especially on slow filesystems. If not set, the value of transfer.unpackLimit is used instead.

fetch.prune

If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the --prune option was given on the command line. See also remote.<name>.prune and the PRUNING section of git-fetch[1].

fetch.pruneTags

If true, fetch will automatically behave as if the refs/tags/*:refs/tags/* refspec was provided when pruning, if not set already. This allows for setting both this option and fetch.prune to maintain a 1=1 mapping to upstream refs. See also remote.<name>.pruneTags and the PRUNING section of git-fetch[1].

fetch.all

If true, fetch will attempt to update all available remotes. This behavior can be overridden by passing --no-all or by explicitly specifying one or more remote(s) to fetch from. Defaults to false.

fetch.output

Control how ref update status is printed. Valid values are full and compact. Default value is full. See the OUTPUT section in git-fetch[1] for details.

fetch.negotiationAlgorithm

Control how information about the commits in the local repository is sent when negotiating the contents of the packfile to be sent by the server. Set to consecutive to use an algorithm that walks over consecutive commits checking each one. Set to skipping to use an algorithm that skips commits in an effort to converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary packfile; or set to noop to not send any information at all, which will almost certainly result in a larger-than-necessary packfile, but will skip the negotiation step. Set to default to override settings made previously and use the default behaviour. The default is normally consecutive, but if feature.experimental is true, then the default is skipping. Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out.

See also the --negotiate-only and --negotiation-restrict options to git-fetch[1].

fetch.showForcedUpdates

Set to false to enable --no-show-forced-updates in git-fetch[1] and git-pull[1] commands. Defaults to true.

fetch.parallel

Specifies the maximal number of fetch operations to be run in parallel at a time (submodules, or remotes when the --multiple option of git-fetch[1] is in effect).

A value of 0 will give some reasonable default. If unset, it defaults to 1.

For submodules, this setting can be overridden using the submodule.fetchJobs config setting.

fetch.writeCommitGraph

Set to true to write a commit-graph after every git fetch command that downloads a pack-file from a remote. Using the --split option, most executions will create a very small commit-graph file on top of the existing commit-graph file(s). Occasionally, these files will merge and the write may take longer. Having an updated commit-graph file helps performance of many Git commands, including git merge-base, git push -f, and git log --graph. Defaults to false.

fetch.bundleURI

This value stores a URI for downloading Git object data from a bundle URI before performing an incremental fetch from the origin Git server. This is similar to how the --bundle-uri option behaves in git-clone[1]. git clone --bundle-uri will set the fetch.bundleURI value if the supplied bundle URI contains a bundle list that is organized for incremental fetches.

If you modify this value and your repository has a fetch.bundleCreationToken value, then remove that fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching from the new bundle URI.

fetch.bundleCreationToken

When using fetch.bundleURI to fetch incrementally from a bundle list that uses the "creationToken" heuristic, this config value stores the maximum creationToken value of the downloaded bundles. This value is used to prevent downloading bundles in the future if the advertised creationToken is not strictly larger than this value.

The creation token values are chosen by the provider serving the specific bundle URI. If you modify the URI at fetch.bundleURI, then be sure to remove the value for the fetch.bundleCreationToken value before fetching.

fetch.followRemoteHEAD

When fetching using a default refspec, this setting determines how to handle differences between a fetched remote’s HEAD and the local remotes/<name>/HEAD symbolic-ref. Its value is one of

create

Create remotes/<name>/HEAD if a ref exists on the remote, but not locally. An existing symbolic-ref will not be touched. This is the default value.

warn

Display a warning if the remote advertises a different HEAD than what is set locally. Behaves like "create" if the local symbolic-ref doesn’t exist.

always

Silently update remotes/<name>/HEAD whenever the remote advertises a new value.

never

Never create or modify the remotes/<name>/HEAD symbolic-ref.

filter.<driver>.clean

The command which is used to convert the content of a worktree file to a blob upon checkin. See gitattributes[5] for details.

filter.<driver>.smudge

The command which is used to convert the content of a blob object to a worktree file upon checkout. See gitattributes[5] for details.

format.attach

Enable multipart/mixed attachments as the default for format-patch. The value can also be a double quoted string which will enable attachments as the default and set the value as the boundary. See the --attach option in git-format-patch[1]. To countermand an earlier value, set it to an empty string.

format.from

Provides the default value for the --from option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a name and email address. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-from, using commit authors directly in the "From:" field of patch mails. If true, format-patch defaults to --from, using your committer identity in the "From:" field of patch mails and including a "From:" field in the body of the patch mail if different. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch uses that value instead of your committer identity. Defaults to false.

format.forceInBodyFrom

Provides the default value for the --[no-]force-in-body-from option to format-patch. Defaults to false.

format.numbered

A boolean which can enable or disable sequence numbers in patch subjects. It defaults to "auto" which enables it only if there is more than one patch. It can be enabled or disabled for all messages by setting it to "true" or "false". See --numbered option in git-format-patch[1].

format.headers

Additional email headers to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See git-format-patch[1].

format.to

format.cc

Additional recipients to include in a patch to be submitted by mail. See the --to and --cc options in git-format-patch[1].

format.subjectPrefix

The default for format-patch is to output files with the [PATCH] subject prefix. Use this variable to change that prefix.

format.coverFromDescription

The default mode for format-patch to determine which parts of the cover letter will be populated using the branch’s description. See the --cover-from-description option in git-format-patch[1].

format.signature

The default for format-patch is to output a signature containing the Git version number. Use this variable to change that default. Set this variable to the empty string ("") to suppress signature generation.

format.signatureFile

Works just like format.signature except the contents of the file specified by this variable will be used as the signature.

format.suffix

The default for format-patch is to output files with the suffix .patch. Use this variable to change that suffix (make sure to include the dot if you want it).

format.encodeEmailHeaders

Encode email headers that have non-ASCII characters with "Q-encoding" (described in RFC 2047) for email transmission. Defaults to true.

format.pretty

The default pretty format for log/show/whatchanged command. See git-log[1], git-show[1], git-whatchanged[1].

format.thread

The default threading style for git format-patch. Can be a boolean value, or shallow or deep. shallow threading makes every mail a reply to the head of the series, where the head is chosen from the cover letter, the --in-reply-to, and the first patch mail, in this order. deep threading makes every mail a reply to the previous one. A true boolean value is the same as shallow, and a false value disables threading.

format.signOff

A boolean value which lets you enable the -s/--signoff option of format-patch by default. Note: Adding the Signed-off-by trailer to a patch should be a conscious act and means that you certify you have the rights to submit this work under the same open source license. Please see the SubmittingPatches document for further discussion.

format.coverLetter

A boolean that controls whether to generate a cover-letter when format-patch is invoked, but in addition can be set to "auto", to generate a cover-letter only when there’s more than one patch. Default is false.

format.commitListFormat

When the --commit-list-format option is not given, format-patch uses the value of this variable to decide how to format the entry of each commit. Defaults to shortlog.

format.outputDirectory

Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the current working directory. All directory components will be created.

format.filenameMaxLength

The maximum length of the output filenames generated by the format-patch command; defaults to 64. Can be overridden by the --filename-max-length=<n> command line option.

format.useAutoBase

A boolean value which lets you enable the --base=auto option of format-patch by default. Can also be set to "whenAble" to allow enabling --base=auto if a suitable base is available, but to skip adding base info otherwise without the format dying.

format.notes

Provides the default value for the --notes option to format-patch. Accepts a boolean value, or a ref which specifies where to get notes. If false, format-patch defaults to --no-notes. If true, format-patch defaults to --notes. If set to a non-boolean value, format-patch defaults to --notes=<ref>, where ref is the non-boolean value. Defaults to false.

If one wishes to use the ref refs/notes/true, please use that literal instead.

This configuration can be specified multiple times in order to allow multiple notes refs to be included. In that case, it will behave similarly to multiple --[no-]notes[=] options passed in. That is, a value of true will show the default notes, a value of <ref> will also show notes from that notes ref and a value of false will negate previous configurations and not show notes.

For example,

[format]
	notes = true
	notes = foo
	notes = false
	notes = bar

will only show notes from refs/notes/bar.

format.mboxrd

A boolean value which enables the robust "mboxrd" format when --stdout is in use to escape "^>+From " lines.

format.noprefix

If set, do not show any source or destination prefix in patches. This is equivalent to the diff.noprefix option used by git diff (but which is not respected by format-patch). Note that by setting this, the receiver of any patches you generate will have to apply them using the -p0 option.

fsck.<msg-id>

During fsck git may find issues with legacy data which wouldn’t be generated by current versions of git, and which wouldn’t be sent over the wire if transfer.fsckObjects was set. This feature is intended to support working with legacy repositories containing such data.

Setting fsck.<msg-id> will be picked up by git-fsck[1], but to accept pushes of such data set receive.fsck.<msg-id> instead, or to clone or fetch it set fetch.fsck.<msg-id>.

The rest of the documentation discusses fsck.* for brevity, but the same applies for the corresponding receive.fsck.* and fetch.fsck.*. variables.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor, the receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> variables will not fall back on the fsck.<msg-id> configuration if they aren’t set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

When fsck.<msg-id> is set, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the fsck.<msg-id> setting where the <msg-id> is the fsck message ID and the value is one of error, warn or ignore. For convenience, fsck prefixes the error/warning with the message ID, e.g. "missingEmail: invalid author/committer line - missing email" means that setting fsck.missingEmail = ignore will hide that issue.

In general, it is better to enumerate existing objects with problems with fsck.skipList, instead of listing the kind of breakages these problematic objects share to be ignored, as doing the latter will allow new instances of the same breakages go unnoticed.

Setting an unknown fsck.<msg-id> value will cause fsck to die, but doing the same for receive.fsck.<msg-id> and fetch.fsck.<msg-id> will only cause git to warn.

See the Fsck Messages section of git-fsck[1] for supported values of <msg-id>.

fsck.skipList

The path to a list of object names (i.e. one unabbreviated SHA-1 per line) that are known to be broken in a non-fatal way and should be ignored. On versions of Git 2.20 and later, comments (#), empty lines, and any leading and trailing whitespace are ignored. Everything but a SHA-1 per line will error out on older versions.

This feature is useful when an established project should be accepted despite early commits containing errors that can be safely ignored, such as invalid committer email addresses. Note: corrupt objects cannot be skipped with this setting.

Like fsck.<msg-id> this variable has corresponding receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variants.

Unlike variables like color.ui and core.editor the receive.fsck.skipList and fetch.fsck.skipList variables will not fall back on the fsck.skipList configuration if they aren’t set. To uniformly configure the same fsck settings in different circumstances, all three of them must be set to the same values.

Older versions of Git (before 2.20) documented that the object names list should be sorted. This was never a requirement; the object names could appear in any order, but when reading the list we tracked whether the list was sorted for the purposes of an internal binary search implementation, which could save itself some work with an already sorted list. Unless you had a humongous list there was no reason to go out of your way to pre-sort the list. After Git version 2.20 a hash implementation is used instead, so there’s now no reason to pre-sort the list.

fsmonitor.allowRemote

By default, the fsmonitor daemon refuses to work with network-mounted repositories. Setting fsmonitor.allowRemote to true overrides this behavior. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.

fsmonitor.socketDir

This Mac OS and Linux-specific option, if set, specifies the directory in which to create the Unix domain socket used for communication between the fsmonitor daemon and various Git commands. The directory must reside on a native filesystem. Only respected when core.fsmonitor is set to true.

gc.aggressiveDepth

The depth parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 50, which is the default for the --depth option when --aggressive isn’t in use.

See the documentation for the --depth option in git-repack[1] for more details.

gc.aggressiveWindow

The window size parameter used in the delta compression algorithm used by git gc --aggressive. This defaults to 250, which is a much more aggressive window size than the default --window of 10.

See the documentation for the --window option in git-repack[1] for more details.

gc.auto

When there are approximately more than this many loose objects in the repository, git gc --auto will pack them. Some Porcelain commands use this command to perform a light-weight garbage collection from time to time. The default value is 6700.

Setting this to 0 disables not only automatic packing based on the number of loose objects, but also any other heuristic git gc --auto will otherwise use to determine if there’s work to do, such as gc.autoPackLimit.

gc.autoPackLimit

When there are more than this many packs that are not marked with *.keep file in the repository, git gc --auto consolidates them into one larger pack. The default value is 50. Setting this to 0 disables it. Setting gc.auto to 0 will also disable this.

See the gc.bigPackThreshold configuration variable below. When in use, it’ll affect how the auto pack limit works.

gc.autoDetach

Make git gc --auto return immediately and run in the background if the system supports it. Default is true. This config variable acts as a fallback in case maintenance.autoDetach is not set.

gc.bigPackThreshold

If non-zero, all non-cruft packs larger than this limit are kept when git gc is run. This is very similar to --keep-largest-pack except that all non-cruft packs that meet the threshold are kept, not just the largest pack. Defaults to zero. Common unit suffixes of k, m, or g are supported.

Note that if the number of kept packs is more than gc.autoPackLimit, this configuration variable is ignored, all packs except the base pack will be repacked. After this the number of packs should go below gc.autoPackLimit and gc.bigPackThreshold should be respected again.

If the amount of memory estimated for git repack to run smoothly is not available and gc.bigPackThreshold is not set, the largest pack will also be excluded (this is the equivalent of running git gc with --keep-largest-pack).

gc.writeCommitGraph

If true, then gc will rewrite the commit-graph file when git-gc[1] is run. When using git gc --auto the commit-graph will be updated if housekeeping is required. Default is true. See git-commit-graph[1] for details.

gc.logExpiry

If the file gc.log exists, then git gc --auto will print its content and exit with status zero instead of running unless that file is more than gc.logExpiry old. Default is "1.day". See gc.pruneExpire for more ways to specify its value.

gc.packRefs

Running git pack-refs in a repository renders it unclonable by Git versions prior to 1.5.1.2 over dumb transports such as HTTP. This variable determines whether git gc runs git pack-refs. This can be set to notbare to enable it within all non-bare repos or it can be set to a boolean value. The default is true.

gc.cruftPacks

Store unreachable objects in a cruft pack (see git-repack[1]) instead of as loose objects. The default is true.

gc.maxCruftSize

Limit the size of new cruft packs when repacking. When specified in addition to --max-cruft-size, the command line option takes priority. See the --max-cruft-size option of git-repack[1].

gc.pruneExpire

When git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago (and repack --cruft --cruft-expiration 2.weeks.ago if using cruft packs via gc.cruftPacks or --cruft). Override the grace period with this config variable. The value "now" may be used to disable this grace period and always prune unreachable objects immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning. This feature helps prevent corruption when git gc runs concurrently with another process writing to the repository; see the "NOTES" section of git-gc[1].

gc.worktreePruneExpire

When git gc is run, it calls git worktree prune --expire 3.months.ago. This config variable can be used to set a different grace period. The value "now" may be used to disable the grace period and prune $GIT_DIR/worktrees immediately, or "never" may be used to suppress pruning.

gc.reflogExpire

gc.<pattern>.reflogExpire

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time; defaults to 90 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

gc.reflogExpireUnreachable

gc.<pattern>.reflogExpireUnreachable

git reflog expire removes reflog entries older than this time and are not reachable from the current tip; defaults to 30 days. The value "now" expires all entries immediately, and "never" suppresses expiration altogether. With "<pattern>" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the <pattern>.

These types of entries are generally created as a result of using git commit --amend or git rebase and are the commits prior to the amend or rebase occurring. Since these changes are not part of the current project most users will want to expire them sooner, which is why the default is more aggressive than gc.reflogExpire.

gc.recentObjectsHook

When considering whether or not to remove an object (either when generating a cruft pack or storing unreachable objects as loose), use the shell to execute the specified command(s). Interpret their output as object IDs which Git will consider as "recent", regardless of their age. By treating their mtimes as "now", any objects (and their descendants) mentioned in the output will be kept regardless of their true age.

Output must contain exactly one hex object ID per line, and nothing else. Objects which cannot be found in the repository are ignored. Multiple hooks are supported, but all must exit successfully, else the operation (either generating a cruft pack or unpacking unreachable objects) will be halted.

gc.repackFilter

When repacking, use the specified filter to move certain objects into a separate packfile. See the --filter=<filter-spec> option of git-repack[1].

gc.repackFilterTo

When repacking and using a filter, see gc.repackFilter, the specified location will be used to create the packfile containing the filtered out objects. WARNING: The specified location should be accessible, using for example the Git alternates mechanism, otherwise the repo could be considered corrupt by Git as it might not be able to access the objects in that packfile. See the --filter-to=<dir> option of git-repack[1] and the objects/info/alternates section of gitrepository-layout[5].

gc.rerereResolved

Records of conflicted merge you resolved earlier are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 60 days. See git-rerere[1].

gc.rerereUnresolved

Records of conflicted merge you have not resolved are kept for this many days when git rerere gc is run. You can also use more human-readable "1.month.ago", etc. The default is 15 days. See git-rerere[1].

gitcvs.commitMsgAnnotation

Append this string to each commit message. Set to empty string to disable this feature. Defaults to "via git-CVS emulator".

gitcvs.enabled

Whether the CVS server interface is enabled for this repository. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.logFile

Path to a log file where the CVS server interface well…​ logs various stuff. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.usecrlfattr

If true, the server will look up the end-of-line conversion attributes for files to determine the -k modes to use. If the attributes force Git to treat a file as text, the -k mode will be left blank so CVS clients will treat it as text. If they suppress text conversion, the file will be set with -kb mode, which suppresses any newline munging the client might otherwise do. If the attributes do not allow the file type to be determined, then gitcvs.allBinary is used. See gitattributes[5].

gitcvs.allBinary

This is used if gitcvs.usecrlfattr does not resolve the correct -kb mode to use. If true, all unresolved files are sent to the client in mode -kb. This causes the client to treat them as binary files, which suppresses any newline munging it otherwise might do. Alternatively, if it is set to "guess", then the contents of the file are examined to decide if it is binary, similar to core.autocrlf.

gitcvs.dbName

Database used by git-cvsserver to cache revision information derived from the Git repository. The exact meaning depends on the used database driver, for SQLite (which is the default driver) this is a filename. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details). May not contain semicolons (;). Default: %Ggitcvs.%m.sqlite

gitcvs.dbDriver

Used Perl DBI driver. You can specify any available driver for this here, but it might not work. git-cvsserver is tested with DBD::SQLite, reported to work with DBD::Pg, and reported not to work with DBD::mysql. Experimental feature. May not contain double colons (:). Default: SQLite. See git-cvsserver[1].

gitcvs.dbUser

gitcvs.dbPass

Database user and password. Only useful if setting gitcvs.dbDriver, since SQLite has no concept of database users and/or passwords. gitcvs.dbUser supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details).

gitcvs.dbTableNamePrefix

Database table name prefix. Prepended to the names of any database tables used, allowing a single database to be used for several repositories. Supports variable substitution (see git-cvsserver[1] for details). Any non-alphabetic characters will be replaced with underscores.