I have app servers that I bootstrap together using Chef + some ad-hoc bash scripts. The problem is, when I want to run an update on one of these app servers, I get:

19:00:28: *** Please tell me who you are.
Run
git config –global user.email “[email protected]”
git config –global user.name “Your Name”

Do I really need to set this for doing a simple git pull origin master every time I update an app server? Is there anyway to override this behavior so it doesn't error out when name and email are not set?

I spent lots of hours on it when I call PHP script to init and commit to git. And I found the work flow should be as:

1. git init
2. git config user.name "someone"
3. git config user.email "[email protected]"
4. git add *
5. git commit -m "some init msg"

If you swap [23] and 1, the config will not work at all.

I wish this will do some help.