Update 2024-12-22: The functionality described here is available natively in modern versions of Git, see more recent note Path-conditional config and SSH key signing in
git.
Update 2024-05-10: Fixed a bug in the provided script.
Update 2024-05-14: Added user name and email config features.
I have separate SSH keys and email addresses for personal
projects and work projects. My work-related Git projects reside in
~/Projects/Work. Without a “directory aware” git
config, I would have to define GIT_SSH_COMMAND when
cloning to use the correct key, as well as set up each work
repository to use the work key for interacting with the remote, as
well as the user.name and user.email
configuration values manually using git config
commands. This is naturally very error prone and is an easy thing to
forget.
To avoid these issues, here’s a script that wraps
git:
#!/bin/bash
# If GIT_SSH_COMMAND is set, skip automatic key selection
if [ -n $GIT_SSH_COMMAND ]; then
echo # skip
elif [[ $PWD == *Projects/Work* ]]; then
echo "dir-aware-git: using work profile"
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND='ssh -i ~/.ssh/work_rsa'
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME='<my work name>'
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='<my work email>'
fi
git "$@"Update the GIT_ environment values as well as the
directory matcher in the elif conditional to suit your
needs.
Save the script as directory-aware-git, make it
executable with chmod +x directory-aware-git and put it
in some directory that is in $PATH. For me, that would
be ~/.local/bin/. Then, add this alias to your shell
config, updated with your selected path:
alias git=~/.local/bin/directory-aware-gitEnjoy 👍
