Naj (我 /*ŋˤajʔ/)

Naj is a lightweight, secure, and idempotent wrapper for Git, written in Rust. It solves the chaos of managing multiple Git identities (Work vs. Personal) by strictly isolating configurations and preventing accidental identity leaks.

🚀 Features

• 🛡️ Fail-Safe Security: Uses "Blind Injection" to forcibly wipe global identity keys before applying a profile. If your profile lacks a key, Naj fails securely rather than falling back to your global ~/.gitconfig.
• ⚡ Ephemeral Execution: Run commands like naj work commit without modifying any files on disk. Perfect for one-off fixes.
• 💾 Persistent Switching: Permanently bind a repository to an identity using Git's native [include] directive.
• 🛠️ Zero Config Setup: Automatically handles clone and init setup, applying the correct identity immediately.
• 📂 Portable Profiles: Profiles are stored in ~/.config/naj/profiles/, designed to be synced via a private Git repository.

📦 Installation

From Source

cargo install --path .

📖 Usage

1. Management: Create Identities

Naj manages identities as "Profiles".

# Syntax: naj -c <Name> <Email> <ProfileID>

naj -c "Alice Work" "alice@company.com" "work"

naj -c "Alice Hobby" "alice@gmail.com" "personal"


# List all profiles

naj -l


# Edit a profile (e.g., to add signingkey or sshCommand)

naj -e work

2. Workflow A: Setup New Projects (Recommended)

When you clone or init a repository, Naj automatically sets up the local config.

# Clones the repo and immediately binds it to the "work" profile

naj work clone git@github.com:company/backend.git


# Inside the repo, you can now just use standard git

cd backend

git config user.email # Output: alice@company.com

3. Workflow B: One-off Commands (Exec Mode)

Run a command with a specific identity without modifying the repository config.

# Temporarily commit as "personal" in a work repo (e.g., fixing a typo)

naj personal commit -m "Fix typo"


# Verification

naj personal config user.email

4. Workflow C: Switch Identity (Persistent)

Change the identity bound to an existing repository.

cd my-repo

naj work


# If the repo has "dirty" config (manually set user.name), force overwrite it:

naj work -f

⚙️ Configuration

Naj follows the XDG Base Directory specification.

• Config File: ~/.config/naj/naj.toml
• Profiles: ~/.config/naj/profiles/*.gitconfig

On the first run, Naj will automatically create these directories and a default configuration file.

Environment Variables

• NAJ_CONFIG_PATH: Override the config directory (Useful for NixOS or testing).
• NAJ_MOCKING=1: Dry-run mode. Prints the constructed git command to stderr instead of executing it.

🔒 Security Design: Blind Injection

In Exec Mode, Naj does not read your local configuration to decide what to override. Instead, it aggressively injects empty values for sensitive keys before applying your profile.

Example command generated by Naj:

git \

  -c user.name="" \       # 1. Wipe potential leaks

  -c user.email="" \

  -c user.signingkey="" \

  -c commit.gpgsign=false \

  -c include.path=~/.config/naj/profiles/work.gitconfig \ # 2. Apply Profile

  commit ...

This ensures that if your "work" profile is missing a GPG key, Git will error out ("Secret key not available") rather than silently using your personal GPG key from ~/.gitconfig.

📦 Build Artifacts

Use a machine running Linux to build artifacts for all targets. rustup, cross, and podman/docker are required.

Run build.sh to build artifacts for all targets.

📄 License

BSD 2-Clause License