Git: “please tell me who you are” error

Question

I have app servers that I bootstrap together using Chef + some ad-hoc bash scripts. The problem is, when I want to run an update on one of these app servers, I get:

Answer 1

IMHO, the proper way to resolve this error is to configure your global git config file.

To do that run the following command: git config --global -e

An editor will appear where you can insert your default git configurations.

Here're are a few:

[user]
    name = your_username
    email = your_username@users.noreply.github.com 
[alias]
    # BASIC
    st = status
    ci = commit
    br = branch
    co = checkout
    df = diff

For more details, see Customizing Git - Git Configuration

When you see a command like, git config ...

$ git config --global core.whitespace \
    trailing-space,space-before-tab,indent-with-non-tab

... you can put that into your global git config file as:

[core]
   whitespace = space-before-tab,-indent-with-non-tab,trailing-space

For one off configurations, you can use something like git config --global user.name 'your_username'

If you don't set your git configurations globally, you'll need to do so for each and every git repo you work with locally.

The user.name and user.email settings tell git who you are, so subsequent git commit commands will not complain, *** Please tell me who you are.

Many times, the commands git suggests you run are not what you should run. This time, the suggested commands are not bad:

$ git commit -m 'first commit'

*** Please tell me who you are.

Run

  git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
  git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Tip: Until I got very familiar with git, making a backup of my project file--before running the suggested git commands and exploring things I thought would work--saved my bacon on more than a few occasions.