I have good news and bad news. Let’s start with the good news.

If you want to get credit for your commits, but don’t want to expose your GitHub email address in the commit logs (have you checked the logs? why haven’t you checked the logs*?), here are the steps you can take. 

First, in GitHub go to Settings – Email – Keep my email address private

You’ll notice a new email saraford-tips@users.noreply.github.com for you to use for your Git commits.

Next, you’ll need to update Git to use this new noreply email instead of your real one. You can do this either from the command line or from GitHub Desktop.

From the command line, provided that you want to change your email address globally across all repos, you’ll simply do

$ git config –global user.email “your-username@users.noreply.github.com”

and then to verify, type

$ git config –global user.email

for example

Or if you want to use GitHub Desktop, it’s just at Options – Configure Git which will do the same as the –global flag, hence the red circle around the global gitconfig message.

You can read more in the GitHub Documentation for keeping your email address private, e.g. how to change only a specific repo, etc.

And now for the bad news.

This change will only apply moving forward. If you’ve been using your personal email address in previous Git commits, you’ll need to do some work to scrub the logs (where possible). Check out the GitHub Documentation for changing author info.

*My favorite all-time scary movie is the 1979 version of When a Stranger Calls. Well, not the entire movie, but just the first 15 minutes. And I don’t think it holds up anymore with smart phones being the norm. But wow, that was something scary! And yeah, you should check the logs… just to make sure you don’t have your email address committed that you don’t want others to see.