Can I see a commit's real Author details in GitHub? (NOT just the GitHub username!)

Question

When looking at a commit in GitHub, I want to see the value of the "Author" field in the commit. As far as I can tell, GitHub will only show me the GitHub username. Too see the author field, I need to fetch the commit and look at it locally, which is kind of annoying.

For instance, see this link:
https://github.com/connamara/quickfixn/commit/b23261bdcda2d62fa8738f88bff8b6819df1f93a

You can see my GitHub username "gbirchmeier", but I want to see the values that I configured via user.name and user.email when I committed.

Answer 1

While not possible directly in the UI, it's only one click from there: Just click patch and have a look at the From: line at the top.

A blog post with more detailed instructions is available here.

Answer 2

Github uses email address to link username to a commit as mentioned here

GitHub uses the email address in the commit header to link the commit to a GitHub user.

Hence not possible to see values configured via user.name

Answer 3

It does not seem possible on the GitHub web UI.

One good possibility if you don't want to clone (that looks like a large one...), is to use https://www.githubarchive.org/ which exports to Google BigQuery with the query:

SELECT payload_commit_name, payload_commit_email
FROM [githubarchive:github.timeline]
WHERE payload_commit_id = 'b23261bdcda2d62fa8738f88bff8b6819df1f93a'
LIMIT 1

If you are interested in mass email scraping, see https://stackoverflow.com/a/32456486/895245