fatal: No existing author found with 'XXX'

user2362956 picture user2362956 · Oct 11, 2014 · Viewed 52.8k times · Source

I used git for the first time and I set my user name and user mail. The commands I used are below:

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.name "bob"
git config user.name "bob"

When I run git commit --author "bob" , I got an error fatal: No existing author found with 'bob'. How can I set user name and email?

Answer

meagar picture meagar · Oct 11, 2014

You should stop using --author each time you commit, and instead configure an author with git config. Once you've done so, you can type git commit and the author will be pulled from your .gitconfig file.

If you want to give --author a name to use for authoring the commit, you need to use

bob <[email protected]>

not just bob. If your author string doesn't match the user <[email protected]> format, Git assumes you've given it a search pattern, and it will try to find commits with matching authors. It will use the first found commit's user <[email protected]> as the author.