Changing gitconfig location on Windows

Question

By default on Windows Git places global  gitconfig in c  documents and settings user   How can I change that position so  gitconfig is stored in c  my configuration files    Can it be done at all

User · Answer

Solution without having to change Windows HOME variable OS  Windows 10 git version  2 27 0 windows 1 I use portable version of Git  so all my config files are on my pen-drive E    This is what worked for me   Download portable Git from https   git-scm com   Run the file and install it in the required location  I installed it in E  git  Run git-bash exe from E  git  I wanted to put  gitconfig and other bash files in E  so I created a folder called home where I want them all in  mkdir home Go to etc folder and open the file called profile  In my case  it s E  git etc profile  Add absolute path to the home directory we created  or to the directory where you want to have your  gitconfig file located  at the end of the profile file  HOME  quot E  git home quot   Now it no longer searches in the C  Users lt username gt  directory for  gitconfig but only looks in your set path above    git config --global --list fatal  unable to read config file  E  git home  gitconfig   No such file or directory  It gave an error because there isn t a  gitconfig file there yet  This is just to demonstrate that we have successfully changed the location of the  gitconfig file without changing the HOME directory in Windows

User · Answer

As someone who has been interested in this for a VERY LONG TIME  See from the manual    XDG CONFIG HOME git config - Second user-specific configuration file  If  XDG CONFIG HOME is not set or empty   HOME  config git config will be used  Any single-valued variable set in this file will be overwritten by whatever is in    gitconfig  It is a good idea not to create this file if you sometimes use older versions of Git  as support for this file was added fairly recently   Which was only recently added  This dump is from 2 15 0   Works for me

User · Answer

If you are on windows and having problem either changing environment variables or mklink because of insufficient privileges  an easy solution to your problem is to start git batch in another location    Just right click on Git Bash exe  click properties and change the  Start in  property to c  my configuration files

User · Answer

If you set HOME to c  my configuration files   then git will locate  gitconfig there  Editing environment variables is described here  You need to set the HOME variable  then re-open any cmd exe window  Use the  set  command to verify that HOME indeed points to the right value   Changing HOME will  of course  also affect other applications  However  from reading git s source code  that appears to be the only way to change the location of these files without the need to adjust the command line  You should also consider Stefan s response  you can set the GIT CONFIG variable  However  to give it the effect you desire  you need to pass the --global flag to all git invocations  plus any local  git config files are ignored

User · Answer

For me  changing the Start In location  of git-gui at least  did not affect where it looked for  gitconfig   My setup at work mounts U  for our home  but we do not have permission to write in U  directly  only subdirectories which were created for us inside  so this was a deal-breaker for me   I solved the problem by making a batch script which would override the HOMEDRIVE and HOMEPATH env variables just for that application   Then changed my Start menu shortcut to point to that batch script instead

User · Answer

For me it worked very simple    Copy   gitconfig  from old directory  to   USERPROFILE   standard in  c  users username   Right click on start-icons of GITGUI and GITBASH and change  run in     HOMEDRIVE  HOMEPATH   to   USERPROFILE    Of cource you can use any other directory instead of   USERPROFILE      screen shot before  screen shot after

User · Answer

I m no Git master  but from searching around the solution that worked easiest for me was to just go to C  Program Files  x86  Git etc and open profile in a text editor   There s an if statement on line 37   Set up USER s home directory  I took out the if statement and put in the local directory that I wanted the gitconfig to be  then I just copied my existing gitconfig file  was on a network drive  to that location

User · Answer

Look in the FILES and ENVIRONMENT section of git help config

User · Answer

First check HOME setting  then change HOME and HOMEDRIVE to a existing dir   c  git gt set HOME HOME U   HOMEDRIVE U  HOMEPATH     then change HOME and HOMEDRIVE by  set HOME c  tmp set HOMEDRIVE C

User · Answer

I wanted to do the same thing  The best I could find was  MicTech s solution  However  as pointed out by  MotoWilliams this does not survive any updates made by Git to the  gitconfig file which replaces the link with a new file containing only the new settings   I solved this by writing the following PowerShell script and running it in my profile startup script  Each time it is run it copies any settings that have been added to the user s  gitconfig to the global one and then replaces all the text in the  gitconfig file with and  include  header that imports the global file   I keep the global  gitconfig file in a repo along with a lot of other global scripts and tools  All I have to do is remember to check in any changes that the script appends to my global file   This seems to work pretty transparently for me  Hope it helps   Sept 9th  Updated to detect when new entries added to the config file are duplicates and ignore them  This is useful for tools like SourceTree which will write new updates if they cannot find existing ones and do not follow includes   function git-config-update      localPath     env USERPROFILE  gitconfig  replace               globalPath    C  src github Global Git gitconfig  replace                redirectAutoText      Generated file  Do not edit  n include  n  path    globalPath n n     localText   get-content  localPath     diffs    compare-object -ref  redirectAutoText split   n   -diff   localText         measure-object  count    if   diffs -eq 0          write-output   gitconfig unchanged       return         skipLines   0    diffs    compare-object -ref   redirectAutoText split   n           select -f 3  -diff   localText   select -f 3    measure-object  count   if   diffs -eq 0           skipLines   4     write-warning  New settings appended to  localPath    n         else         write-warning  New settings found in  localPath    n          localLines    get-content  localPath   select -Skip  skipLines  -join   n     newSettings    localLines Split          StringSplitOptions   RemoveEmptyEntries         where     String   IsNullOrWhiteSpace                  TrimEnd         globalLines    get-content   globalPath  -join   n     globalSettings     globalLines Split          StringSplitOptions   RemoveEmptyEntries        where     String   IsNullOrWhiteSpace                  TrimEnd         appendSettings     newSettings         Trim            where      globalSettings -contains    Trim         if   string   IsNullOrWhitespace  appendSettings           write-output  No new settings found         else         echo  appendSettings     add-content  globalPath    n  Additional settings added from  env COMPUTERNAME on      Get-Date -displayhint date      n     appendSettings        set-content  localPath  redirectAutoText -force

User · Answer

Change HOME directory for this is wrong  Better is create symbolic link for gitconfig to HOME directory    Move your  gitconfig from user home directory  to the directory where you want  Run command line as Administrator Go to your user home directory Enter mklink  gitconfig  PathForNewLocationOfConfig gitconfig

User · Answer

Change to folder  PROGRAMFILES  Git etc Edit file profile Add to first line HOME  c  location were you want gitconfig  Done   Note  The file permissions are usually restricted  so change them accordingly or you won t be able to save your changes

User · Answer

I have solved this problem using a slightly different approach that I have seen work for other configuration files   Git Config supports includes that allows you to point to a configuration file in another location   That alternate location is then imported and expanded in place as if it was part of  gitconfig file   So now I just have a single entry in  gitconfig    include     path   c   path  to  my config   Any updates written by Git to the  gitconfig file will not overwrite my include path   It does mean that occasionally I may need to move values from  gitconfig to my config

[windows] Changing .gitconfig location on Windows

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