How to Understand the Git Commit Signoff Feature

In this article, we will be exploring the Git commit signoff feature. This feature allows us to add a line containing our full name and email address to our commits.

The signoff serves as a confirmation of ownership and permission to submit commits.

Understand the Git Commit Signoff Feature

Like most other features in Git, we can customize our signoff by making a few changes in the .gitconfig file. It is possible because the feature relies on the user.name and user.email values in the Git configuration file.

Here is how you can configure your signoff. We will run the following commands on the bash to configure our details:

$ git config --local --add user.name "John Wachira"
$ git config --local --add user.email "wachirajohnie11@gmail.com"

We add the -s argument to the git commit command to include a signoff while committing changes.

We will make a new commit and use the -s argument in our repository to confirm the case. We will run:

$ git commit -s -m "Configure"

The command above will add a gpg signature to our commit. Let’s run the git log command to check the latest commit in our repository.

This feature is a requirement when getting patches into the Linux Kernel. However, most projects do not require it.