Starting With Git (Or rebuilding your dev environment from scratch)

Starting With Git (Or rebuilding your dev environment from scratch)

This guide isn't about the history of git or what it is. This should serve simply as a reference point for installing and setting up your git environment. We'll dive in to more Git goodness later on..

Git Installation

To git started (lol), we'll start by visiting https://git-scm.com/downloads

This part is fairly straight-forward. Choose your OS and follow the installation guide given.

Version Control Hub

There are various options to choose from, such as:

  • GitHub
  • GitLab
  • BitBucket

These are the most common, but we'll be focused on GitHub. If you don't already have an account, sign up here.

Note your user name. We'll use the same one when configuring git on your machine. Speaking of..

Configuring Git

Now that git is installed on your machine, we'll set some global configurations.

Open either:

  • Terminal

or

  • Git Bash

What you use will depend on your OS. You can configure Git to run in Command Prompt/PowerShell, but we'll discuss that in a separate article.

Once open, type the following:

$ git config --global user.name "github_username"

$ git config --global user.email "email_used_on_github"

Replace the quotes with their respective values (the username you used for github and the email you signed up on github with.)

And that's about it for here! You have a few options for securely accessing repositories, which I'll link here and leave for you to decide: