Installing Git

Before we can start playing with Git, we'll have to install it. I'll quickly cover installing Git on Linux, Mac and Windows. I will not get into really fine detail, because others have done that much better, but I will give you an overview and links as to where to find more detailed instructions on each platform.

For any of these examples, you can find a link to the most current Git source code at https://github.com/git/git.

I would recommend compiling from source if possible, simply because Git is lately making big strides in usability, so more current versions may be a bit easier to use.

Installing on Linux

If you are installing from source, it will go something like the standard:

wget https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.4.4.tar.bz2
tar jxpvf git-1.5.4.4.tar.bz2
cd git-1.5.4.4
make prefix=/usr all doc info
sudo make prefix=/usr install install-doc install-info

If you are running Ubuntu or another Debian based system, you can run

apt-get install git-core

or on yum based systems, you can often run:

yum install git-core

Installing on Mac

TODO This section is way outdated; needs revising

You are likely going to want to install Git without the asciidoc dependency, because it is a pain to install. Other than that, what you basically need is Curl and Expat. With the exception of the Leopard binary OS X installer, you will also need the Developer Tools installed. If you don't have the OS X install discs anymore, you can get the tools from TODO.

Windows

There are two options on Windows currently, but the popular one is https://gitforwindows.org/ (formerly MSysGit), which installs easily and can be run on the Windows command line. Simply download the exe file from the website, execute it and follow the on-screen instructions.