Linux in a Nutshell, 6th Edition

Before You Start

Before you start using Git for the first time, you need to set two global configuration values, user.email and user.name, or else you won’t be able to make new commits. Here’s how:

$ git config --global user.name 'John Smith'
$ git config --global user.email '[e-mail]'

These settings will remain in place across all your repositories, so you don’t have to reset them every time. You can also override them on a per-repository basis if you want, by running the commands in a particular repository and omitting the --global option.