Configuring Git with environment variables

April 26th, 2026

As well as commands like git config --local, Git can also be configured using environment variables.

Whilst working for client projects, I often need to change my email address or clone repositories using a different SSH key.

With environment variables, I can do this:

export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="[email protected]"
export GIT_SSH_COMMAND="ssh -i ~/.ssh/foo -o IdentitiesOnly=yes"

This works well when used with direnv - a tool that manages environment variables based on directory.

This means I can create one .envrc file for the directory containing that client's projects, and it will automatically use the correct SSH key and email address.