These variables control various optional help messages designed to aid new users. All advice.* variables default to true, and you can tell Git that you do not need help by setting these to false:

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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-checkout[1] when switching branch.

Advise to consider using the -u option to git-status[1] when the command takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate untracked files.

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

Advice to consider using the --quiet option to git-reset[1] when the command takes more than 2 seconds to enumerate unstaged changes after reset.

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

Advice on how to set your identity configuration when your information is guessed from the system username and domain name.

Advice shown when you used git-checkout[1] to move to the detach HEAD state, to instruct how to create a local branch after the fact.

Advice shown when the argument to git-checkout[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 used by default in some situations where this advice would be printed.

Advice that shows the location of the patch file when git-am[1] fails to apply it.

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

Advice on what to do when you’ve accidentally added one git repo inside of another.

Advice shown if a hook is ignored because the hook is not set as executable.

Print a message to the terminal whenever Git is waiting for editor input from the user.

Advice shown if a user attempts to recursively tag a tag object.

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).

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If set, the value of this variable is used as a command which will identify all files that may have changed since the requested date/time. This information is used to speed up git by avoiding unnecessary processing of files that have not changed. See the "fsmonitor-watchman" section of githooks[5].

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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).

Enable the reflog. Updates to a ref is logged to the file "$GIT_DIR/logs/", by appending the new and old SHA-1, the date/time and the reason of the update, but only when the file exists. If this configuration variable is set to true, missing "$GIT_DIR/logs/" 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.

Internal variable identifying the repository format and layout version.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Maximum number of bytes 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.

Files larger than this size are stored deflated, without attempting delta compression. Storing large files without delta compression avoids excessive memory usage, at the slight expense of increased disk usage. Additionally files larger than this size are always treated as binary.

Default is 512 MiB on all platforms. This should be reasonable for most projects as source code and other text files can still be delta compressed, but larger binary media files won’t be.

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

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].

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.

In addition to .gitattributes (per-directory) and .git/info/attributes, Git looks into this file for attributes (see gitattributes[5]). Path expansions are made the same way as for core.excludesFile. 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.

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.

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].

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 would select a character that is not the beginning character of any line in existing commit messages.

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).

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).

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.

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).

tabwidth= 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.

This boolean will enable fsync() when writing object files.

This is a total waste of time and effort on a filesystem that orders data writes properly, but can be useful for filesystems that do not use journalling (traditional UNIX filesystems) or that only journal metadata and not file contents (OS X’s HFS+, or Linux ext3 with "data=writeback").

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.

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.

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.

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].

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

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.

Use the multi-pack-index file to track multiple packfiles using a single index. See the multi-pack-index design document.

Enable "sparse checkout" feature. See section "Sparse checkout" in git-read-tree[1] for more information.

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. The minimum length is 4.

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.

Command aliases for the git[1] command wrapper - e.g. after defining "alias.last = cat-file commit HEAD", the invocation "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. Arguments are split by spaces, the usual shell quoting and escaping is supported. A quote pair or a backslash can be used to quote them.

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 that 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].

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

By default, git am will fail if the patch does not apply cleanly. When set to true, this setting tells git am 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. See git-am[1].

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 tells git apply to respect all whitespace differences. See git-apply[1].

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

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

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

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].

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

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

Tells git branch 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. 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. This option defaults to true.

When a new branch is created with git branch or git checkout that tracks another branch, this variable tells Git to set up pull to rebase instead of merge (see "branch..rebase"). When never, rebase is never automatically set to true. When local, rebase is set to true for tracked branches of other local branches. When remote, rebase is set to true for tracked branches of remote-tracking branches. When 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.

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

When on branch , it tells git fetch and git push which remote to fetch from/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..pushRemote. If no remote is configured, or if you are not on any branch, it defaults to origin for fetching and remote.pushDefault for pushing. Additionally, . (a period) is the current local repository (a dot-repository), see branch..merge's final note below.

When on branch , it overrides branch..remote for pushing. It also overrides remote.pushDefault for pushing from branch . 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.

Defines, together with branch..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 , 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..remote". The merge information is used by git pull (which at 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 from another branch in the local repository, you can point branch..merge to the desired branch, and use the relative path setting . (a period) for branch..remote.

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

When true, rebase the branch 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, 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 preserve (deprecated in favor of merges), also pass --preserve-merges along to git rebase so that locally committed merge commits will not be flattened by running git pull.

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

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].)

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]).

When you run git checkout and only have one remote, it may implicitly fall back on checking out and tracking e.g. origin/. This stops working as soon as you have more than one remote with a 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-checkout[1] when git checkout will checkout the 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.

Optimizes the performance of "git checkout -b " when using sparse-checkout. When set to true, git will not update the repo based on the current sparse-checkout settings. This means it will not update the skip-worktree bit in the index nor add/remove files in the working directory to reflect the current sparse checkout settings nor will it show the local changes.

A boolean to make git-clean do nothing unless given -f, -i or -n. Defaults to true.

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).

Use customized color for hints.

This can be used to color the metadata of a blame line depending on 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 given the colors if the 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.

Use the customized color for the part of git-blame output that is repeated meta information per line (such as commit id, author name, date and timezone). Defaults to cyan.

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).

Use customized color for branch coloration. 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).

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[=] option.

Use customized color for diff colorization. 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 setting of --color-moved in git-diff[1] for details), contextDimmed, oldDimmed, newDimmed, contextBold, oldBold, and newBold (see git-range-diff[1] for details).

Use customized color for git log --decorate output. 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.

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).

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

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

filename prefix (when not using -h)

function name lines (when using -p)

line number prefix (when using -n)

column number prefix (when using --column)

matching text (same as setting matchContext and matchSelected)

matching text in context lines

matching text in selected lines

non-matching text in selected lines

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

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).

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

A boolean to enable/disable colored output when the pager is in use (default is true).

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).

Use customized color for push errors.

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).

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

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).

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).

Use customized color for status colorization. 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).

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).

Use customized color when a push was rejected.

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.

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 show in columns

never show in columns

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.

fill columns before rows

fill rows before columns

show in one column

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

make unequal size columns to utilize more space

make equal size columns

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

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

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

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

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 comment character # 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 # in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

When using git diff to compare with work tree files, do not consider stat-only change 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.

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=). The fallback defaults (when not changed by diff.dirstat) are changes,noncumulative,3. The following parameters are available:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 also honors 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.

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:

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

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

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

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

compares two non-git things (1) and (2).

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

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.

The number of files to consider when performing the copy/rename detection; equivalent to the git diff option -l. This setting has no effect if rename detection is turned off.

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].

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

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".

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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..cmd variable is defined.

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..cmd variable is defined.

araxis

bc

bc3

codecompare

deltawalker

diffmerge

diffuse

ecmerge

emerge

examdiff

guiffy

gvimdiff

gvimdiff2

gvimdiff3

kdiff3

kompare

meld

opendiff

p4merge

smerge

tkdiff

vimdiff

vimdiff2

vimdiff3

winmerge

xxdiff

Set this option to true to enable experimental heuristics that shift diff hunk boundaries to make patches easier to read.

Choose a diff algorithm. The variants are as follows:

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

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

Use "patience diff" algorithm when generating patches.

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

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= overrides this setting.

If set to either a valid 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.

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

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

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.

Prompt before each invocation of the diff tool.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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..pruneTags and the PRUNING section of git-fetch[1].

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

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 "skipping" to use an algorithm that skips commits in an effort to converge faster, but may result in a larger-than-necessary packfile; The default is "default" which instructs Git to use the default algorithm that never skips commits (unless the server has acknowledged it or one of its descendants). Unknown values will cause git fetch to error out.

See also the --negotiation-tip option for git-fetch[1].

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].

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.

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].

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

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

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

A boolean value which lets you enable the -s/--signoff option of format-patch by default. Note: Adding the Signed-off-by: line 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.

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.

Set a custom directory to store the resulting files instead of the current working directory.

A boolean value which lets you enable the --base=auto option of format-patch by default.

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

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

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

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

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

When fsck. is set, errors can be switched to warnings and vice versa by configuring the fsck. setting where the 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. value will cause fsck to die, but doing the same for receive.fsck. and fetch.fsck. will only cause git to warn.

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 is 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. 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 they must all 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.

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.

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.

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 any other heuristic git gc --auto will otherwise use to determine if there’s work to do, such as 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.

Make git gc --auto return immediately and run in background if the system supports it. Default is true.

If non-zero, all packs larger than this limit are kept when git gc is run. This is very similar to --keep-base-pack except that all packs that meet the threshold are kept, not just the base 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-base-pack).

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 false. See git-commit-graph[1] for details.

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.

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.

When git gc is run, it will call prune --expire 2.weeks.ago. 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].

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.

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 "" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle the setting applies only to the refs that match the .

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 "" (e.g. "refs/stash") in the middle, the setting applies only to the refs that match the .

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.

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].

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].

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

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

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

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].

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.

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

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].

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).

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.