The git configuration files are stored at three different levels.
Local are stored within the cloned repository’s .git folder and the file is named config.
Global is stored in a file with no name and with the extension .gitconfig. It’s stored in your home directory. On Windows this can be confusing especially if the home directory is in a roaming profile. For example, normally we’d find the it in c:\users\your-user-name, however if you have a roaming profile then you’ll need to check
HOME="$HOMEDRIVE$HOMEPATH"
So for example this might end up as H:\
System is stored as gitconfig (filename but no extension). In the case of a Windows OS, this will be in C:\Program Files\Git\mingw64\etc, further configuration data may be found in the config file (filename but no extension) within C:\ProgramData\Git.
Scope
The scope of these files is as follows, local overrides global options and global overrides system.
List the configurations
If you execute the command below, you’ll see a list of all the configuration along with the location of the files used.
git config --list --show-origin
Note: beware if passwords are stored in the configuration then these will be displayed when you run this command.
The command does not show you what’s “actually” being used for configuration from the current repo. so much as “here’s all the configuration values”, so you’ll need to look at the scope of each file to determine what values are currently being used by git.
We can also use the same command along with the switch –local, –system and –global to list the files used along with the configuration used.
Further reading