Install and Setup Git

In the last section we created a new project on GitHub–the next step is to clone that repository to our local machine to start working on it. To do that, you will need Git installed on your computer.

Install Git

Installing this free and open source software is pretty straightforward:

Open a Terminal

For this workshop we will be using Git on the command line. Although there are GUI clients to manage Git repositories, being familiar with the command line version will help you better understand the basic workflow.

So the first step is to open a terminal window!

On Windows you will have to use “Git Bash” which comes packaged with the Git installer. This provides a UNIX-like environment, so your commands are the same as on Linux or Mac. Open your Start menu and search for “Git Bash” to open your terminal. You can also right click on a folder in File Explorer and choose the option “Git Bash Here”–this can save time navigating around on the command line!

On Mac and Linux, your terminal app is called “terminal”! Search for it and open. You are ready to go!

Check the command line navigation cheatsheet or this mini-lesson if you need a refresher.

Git Setup

Some initial setup is necessary the first time you use Git on a computer. You will use these commands only once, unless you want to change something.

Set your user name and email (matching your GitHub account):

git config --global user.name "example name"
git config --global user.email "myemail@gmail.com"

(If you set set up email privacy on GitHub, remember to use the correct email alias!)

Next, set your default text editor. The current versions of the Git for Windows installer allow you to set the default editor during setup, so Windows users should not need to complete this step. In general Linux and Mac users should set their Git core.editor to "nano -w" as well. Nano is a basic command line editor that is fairly easy to use. Set the default editor with this command:

git config --global core.editor "nano -w"

Git opens the default editor to ask for commit messages if you did not provide one–which you are most likely to encounter it when merging.

The default default is Vim, which can be confusing… If you are stuck in Vim and can’t figure out how to escape, type Esc then :wq then Enter to save and quit (VIM quick ref, and don’t worry, you are not alone in confusion).

With our test repository ready on GitHub and Git configured on your computer, we can move on to the basic Git workflow!

Note: one more config you might run in to is for pull. Recent Git installations do not have a default behavior set for git pull, so the first time you encounter a conflict and merge, you will get a big error message asking which approach you want to use (merge or rebase). To avoid this, you can set the old default behavior in your config, which is git config --global pull.rebase false.

mkdir example-repo
cd example-repo
git init