git init with specified user.email

git checkout has a --config option so one can do:

    git clone --config 'user.email=email-for-this-clone' ...

which I find nice to setup as git alias:

    clone-work = clone --config 'user.email=my-work-email'

(while leaving the default clone for my personal projects; or an alias for clone-personal with the work email as the clone default).

I would like something similar for git init. However, git init does not have a `--config` option. I tried to use

    git -c 'user.email=my-work-email' init

but that's not working (I'm guessing it only picks up configurations mentioned on the man page for git-init).

I am currently working around this with a template for work but would prefer to init with `-c` (or similar) or at least understand why this is not possible.

-- David

On 2026-01-08 at 17:21:31, David Miguel Susano Pinto wrote:

The reason this functionality exists is because it sets those configuration variables as soon as the repository is initialized and _before_ actually downloading the data. As an example, if you wanted to set a split index or a default line ending configuration, you'd want to set that before the index was created and the working tree was checked out, so you can't do that after the clone command completes.

`git -c` (where `-c` precedes the subcommand) is different. It sets the configuration option _for this command only_ and doesn't save it in the config. For instance, if you want to run a single diff command without colours, you can run `git -c color.diff=false diff`; that won't affect any of the configuration files.

The reason that Git doesn't provide a config option for `git init` is because, except for things like the hash algorithm and ref format, almost nothing is done to the repository when the command completes. There isn't even an index created, so setting configuration like split index in a separate configuration command isn't a problem.

This is possible with an alias like so:

    init-work = "!f() { dir=\"$1\"; shift; git init \"$@\" \"$dir\"; git -C \"$dir\" config set user.email my-work-email; }"

This would work slightly differently in that you'd need to specify the directory first unless you wanted to adjust the alias to do more complicated shell parsing. You could also implement a shell script called `git-init-work` (using `git rev-parse --parseopt`[0] or otherwise) that would handle the complexities and it would work just like the alias as long as you put it in `PATH`.

One other approach that might work for you is the includeIf functionality in the config file. You could do something like this in your main config file:

    [includeIf "gitdir:~/checkouts/work/**"]
        path = ~/.config/git/config-work

And then set the `user.email` value in `~/.config/git/work`. That would mean that any repositories under `~/checkouts/work` would automatically have the config values in `~/.config/git/config-work` set.

[0] If you want an example of using `git rev-parse --parseopt`, you can see https://github.com/bk2204/dotfiles/blob/dev/bin/dct-mtree, which demonstrates some of the functionality. The manual page is also helpful.