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I have a small team of developers and we have purchased a small private repository account. Essentially all we want to do is have this central repository store all of our source code and for each individual developer be able to push and pull to and from that repository as necessary.

My understanding of how this works is that each each developer push and pulls to the CLONE URL of the repository (for example: git@github.com:SmallDevTeam/SourceCode). Along with this I am under the impression that each individual developer must have a separate GitHub account and that GitHub identifies each individual developer's commits via their SSH key.

Currently, the central repository is set up but contains no SSH Keys. Two of the developers have set up their individual accounts also and have stored their SSH Keys on their accounts.

However, when each developer commits to the remote repository using TortoiseGit, there is no clear evidence of who has committed what aside from the news feed (which is useless as time passes by). I expected to have some sort of log of who the author of each commit was, however GitHub just states that the Author is the central repository

(For Example: The repository is set up at git@github.com:SmallDevTeam/SourceCode, therefore the Author is stated as being [SmallDevTeam]).

Am I missing something? Surely this should be the developers account name instead?

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2 Answers 2

You have to set your name and email locally. You should be able to do this via Tortoise's settings. Keep in mind that for git, a commiter is not necessarily the guy who pushes it to the remote server. Thus setting your committers' names locally should get you what you want.

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We use this GitHub configuration for development with a team. We have a single company account that owns the repositories. Each developer has their own account, for personal projects, Open Source contributions and work. We grant each of the developers working on a project access to the company's repository. All of the company's repositories are private.

It sounds like your developers are checking out the code to their systems using the company login credentials, or TortiseGit can't determine who they are from their system login (we use Macs, so it's a Unix username that normally matches a GitHub username).

Have each developer:

  • Visit their GitHub account page
  • Record their unique details from the "Global git config information" link
  • Configure TortiseGit to use these credentials on their development machine

Again, be sure to allow each developer as Repository Collaborator (for each private project) via the project's edit page.

As a side-note, we're looking at CodebaseHQ as an alternative to GitHub for commercial project hosting. We're still using GitHub for our Open Source applications and personal projects. You might like CodebaseHQ too.

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