Now before we start playing with Git to create repositories and adding/modifying stuff, there are a few things we should do to configure Git for the first time. Once we've done these, we'll hardly modify these settings, though we may if needs be. The first thing we need to do is set up our identity by specifying a username and an e-mail address. This is important because every Git commit uses this information, as shown in the following command:

$ git config --global user.name "John Doe"
$ git config --global user.email [email protected]

The global flag sets this information at machine level, so we need to do this only once (until we need to change it), or we can configure it on a per-project basis by running this command without the global option. We can also configure the editor which will be used while typing a (commit) message. Once we are done configuring it, we can run the following command to check all the settings:

$ git config --list