Author Identity Unknown and why doesn't gh auth setup-git also set global config

[petreeb]

If a user authenticates gh cli with

gh auth login

then uses

gh auth setup-git

to use GitHub CLI as a credential helper for git, why doesn't it also set the

git config --global user.email 'YOUREMAIL@EXAMPLE.COM'
git config --global user.name Your Name'

values for the user it just authorized?

[williammartin]

There's some discussion about it here #6096

[Masoud9215]

@williammartin

[chrisjcthomas]

I would not expect gh auth setup-git to set git config user.name / user.email.

Those solve different problems:

• gh auth login / gh auth setup-git configure authentication so Git and gh can talk to GitHub.
• git config user.name / user.email configure commit author identity in Git history.

Git author identity is intentionally separate because plenty of people use:

• different identities for work vs personal repositories
• different emails per repo
• a noreply email instead of their primary GitHub email

So auto-writing global author settings during gh auth setup-git would be a pretty surprising side effect for a command whose documented purpose is credential-helper setup.

If you want a one-time setup, I would keep it explicit:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
gh auth setup-git

Or set name/email at the repository level instead of globally when you need different identities.