Bitbucket+Sourcetree: Tutorial issues; commit says "Please tell me who you are"
Asked by lejonmanen:

Hello!

I've been wrestling with getting Sourcetree to work for the last day. I'm failing on the tutorial. First obstacle was finding the "SSH/HTTPS button". There's no such button. There is a "clone" button which shows a dialog where you can select HTTPS or SSH and click "Clone in Sourcetree". I assumed the latter button is what was expected. The tutorial didn't help me at all in figuring out how to setup an SSH key, fortunately I was eventually able to fix that.

Next obstacle was figuring out that the tutorial forced me to install Git. Maybe I should have figured that out faster, there were some hints. (I wanted to only use Mercurial since I find the idea of two separate version control systems on the same machine redundant. Beats me why the tutorial assumes git.)

The current obstacle occurred when I, having cloned the repository, checked out the code and made some changes; tried to commit. Git gave me an error message: "Please tell me who you are". After googling this error (which the tutorial didn't warn me about) it seems I should install Git separate from Sourcetree and do some configuration to it. The really weird thing is that I entered my name and email address in the Sourcetree options menu, general tab, Default user information. I checked the "Allow SourceTree to modify your global Git and Mercurial config files". So Sourcetree should tell Git whatever Git needs to know. Is this how the tutorial is supposed to work?

I'm using Windows Vista and SourceTree version 1.4.1.0. Thanks in advance for any help

/David


Answers:
author: Seth
body: Try modifying the option for "Use global user settings" in Repository -\> Repository Settings --\> Advanced

comments: author: lejonmanen
body: After disabling and enabling that option, commit went through without any problems. Someone should probably fix this in the code though. Confuses new users, such as me...


author: Antoine Gu?d?s
body: I had the same issue, and this worked perfectly. Thank you!


author: manohar_cheruvupalle
body: thanks a lot it worked for me.


author: Peter E
body: The response of Seth Foss didn't help me, but I found that this worked for me:

Settings \> Edit Config File ...

Then look for this section: "\[user\]" and remove any duplicates. (I had multiple entries of this section).

comments: author: Ses Vinyes
body: Seth answer didn't work for me either, but this did! Thanks a lot!

By the way, I also had to add the e-mail manually in the config file:

email = [myemial@server.com](mailto:myemial@server.com)

Just below the "\[user\]" tag you mentioned. However, I'm guessing that after removing the extra "\[user\]" tags this wouldn't have been necessary if I had checked "Use global user settings".

Anyhow, thanks again!


author: lejonmanen
body: When I signed up to BitBucket, I was presented with a "tutorial repository". I've been following the README.text file in that, which is dated 2013-08-30.

(But the current problem is with git)


author: Seth
body: What tutorial are you using? Not too long ago, SourceTree only supported Git, not Mercurial, so it is sounds like an outdated tutorial.


Tags: tutorial