Git in the terminal

This page is for setting up Git if you want to use it in a terminal.

If you have never been in a terminal shell, please briefly read this crash course, and consider watching this shell tutorial video by Richard Darst (20 min).

Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what and when, and has options for updating a shared or public version of your code on source code repository hosting platforms such as GitHub or GitLab or Bitbucket.

Please follow the installation, configuration, and verification instructions below.

Installation

WindowsmacOSLinux

You can follow the steps below by watching the Carpentries video tutorial.

• Download the Git for Windows installer.

• Run the installer and follow the steps below:

  1. Click on “Next” four times (two times if you’ve previously installed Git). You don’t need to change anything in the Information, location, components, and start menu screens.

  2. From the dropdown menu select an editor:

     • If you use VS Code: Select that from the list. You must have VS Code installed already.

     • If you don’t know what else to do: “Use the Nano editor by default” (NOTE: you will need to scroll up to find it) and click on “Next”.**

     • If are comfortable with another editor and know it is installed, you can select it - but Nano is the safest if you don’t know what to choose.

     After this, you don’t have to do step 2 “selecting an editor” step below (but that step lets you change your choice).

  3. On the page that says “Adjusting the name of the initial branch in new repositories”, choose “Override the default branch name for new repositories” and choose main. This will ensure the highest level of compatibility for our lessons.

  4. Ensure that “Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software” is selected and click on “Next”. (If you don’t do this Git Bash will not work properly, requiring you to remove the Git Bash installation, re-run the installer and to select the “Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software” option.)

  5. Choosing the OpenSSH executable: “Use bundled OpenSSH” and click “Next”.

  6. Ensure that “Use the native Windows Secure Channel Library” is selected and click on “Next”.

  7. Ensure that “Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings” is selected and click on “Next”.

  8. Ensure that “Use Windows’ default console window” is selected and click on “Next”.

  9. Ensure that “Default (fast-forward or merge) is selected and click “Next”

  10. Ensure that “Git Credential Manager” is selected and click on “Next”. (if “Core” is an option, pick that)

  11. Ensure that “Enable file system caching” is selected and click on “Next”.

  12. Configuring experimental options: don’t select either and click “Next”.

  13. Click on “Install”.

  14. Click on “Finish” or “Next”.

• If your “HOME” environment variable is not set (or you don’t know what this is):

  1. Open command prompt (Open Start Menu then type cmd and press enter)

  2. Type the following line into the command prompt window exactly as shown: setx HOME "%USERPROFILE%"

  3. Press enter, you should see SUCCESS: Specified value was saved.

  4. Quit command prompt by typing exit then pressing enter.

• If you are using a Windows laptop managed by your organization, it might be that your “HOME” variable is pointing to a network disk (a storage location that is not physically in your laptop, usually starting with “Z:”). This should not be an issue per se, but it has caused problems to some participants in the past. If you are experiencing issues with Git Bash, you can try setting HOME to a location on the physical disk, for example “C:\Users$USERNAME”. Please note that, depending on the settings of your organisation, automatic backups might not cover the newly set home folder. Follow instructions from your local ITs on how to make sure that also those folders are backed up.

This will provide you with both Git and Bash in the Git Bash program. You can then start it by searching for “Git Bash” in your Start menu.

Text copied and adapted from: the Carpentries set up page

---

Configuration

Prerequisites

We assume that you have:

• Bash (or Zsh on macOS) shell terminal on your machine

• Git installed on your machine

• Nano editor available (unless you prefer a different terminal editor)

Video instruction

This video (9 min) shows how to configure Git. If you experience problems, watch this troubleshooting video.

Step 0: Start your terminal that has git

WindowsmacOSLinux

Start the application Git Bash.

This is the command line interface. Did you read/watch the crash course above?

Step 1: Setting user name and email

First, the following commands will set your user name and email address:

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"
$ git config --global user.email yourname@example.com

If you are unsure which email to use, use the one that you have registered at GitHub with.

This name and email will be public on GitHub when you make contributions, including in this course. If you prefer to not use a real email address but still want to make sure that GitHub counts your contributions, you can use yourusername@users.noreply.github.com (replace yourusername).

This is important since your Git commits use this information. The --global option uses this information for every repository for this user on this computer.

Different name/emails for different repositories

If you need different name/email for different repositories see this StackOverflow question for configuring based on directory and the raw configuration options, including something that works based on remote URLs (but it needs a newer git version).

Step 2: Setting an editor

It is important to set also the default text editor to use with Git. We recommend to use nano if you do not have any other preferences (it is included and simple for demonstrations). But you can instead use your preferred editor (VS Code, vim, emacs or any other editor of your choice, see Text editors for more instructions):

This sets the editor to Nano:

$ git config --global core.editor nano

To set other editors, see Text editors.

Step 3: Set default branch

The default branch on GitHub and GitLab is main but it used to be master. In our workshop we will use main as the default branch also in the terminal to be consistent with GitHub and GitLab:

$ git config --global init.defaultbranch main

This configuration will unfortunately have no effect on Git older than 2.28. But this is not a problem. During the lesson we will have a workaround for this.

Step 4: Two more settings for Windows only

We have found that these two settings prevent warnings and/or seeing no output in some commands on Windows (no need to run these on macOS or Linux). At the bottom of this page we motivate in more detail what these two do:

$ git config --global core.autocrlf false
$ git config --global core.pager cat

---

Verification

Prerequisites

We assume that you have:

• Bash (or Zsh on macOS) shell terminal on your machine

• Git installed and configured, with nano as its editor on your machine (unless you prefer a different terminal text editor)

The following shows the same steps that are shown in the video above. You can see verification part in the same video for configuration at 5:50.

Step 1: Check your Git version

Check your git version:

$ git --version

git version 2.39.2

• We recommend at least 2.23.

• Ideal is 2.28 and newer.

• But the lesson and workshop will still work even with Git 2.0 and we will add instructions/workarounds for Git below 2.28 or 2.23.

Step 2: git init -b main inside a new folder

Create a new example folder, step into it, and initialize a repository. Do not git init -b main in your home directory:

$ mkdir example
$ cd example
$ git init -b main

Step 3: Make a new file

Make a new file with some content:

$ nano example.txt

Write some text in the example.txt, save (ctrl+O then ENTER) and exit (ctrl+X).

Step 4: Stage the change

Stage a newly made file example.txt before committing the change and record in Git:

$ git add example.txt

Step 5: Commit the change with a message

The following command will commit the change. It should open the editor which you have configured. Then, add a commit message such as initial commit at the very top. Then save an exit (if you use the default nano editor, ctrl+O ENTER then ctrl+X):

$ git commit

Step 6: See the change log

$ git log

If you see now something line this your Git is configured for the workshop (the name, email, commit message and also the “12e4cb8…” part will be different in your case):

commit 12e4cb892140bd14a413895b3b36c27db198eb22 (HEAD -> main)
Author: Radovan Bast <bast@users.noreply.github.com>
Date:   Fri May 15 16:41:13 2020 +0200

    making a test commit

---

Troubleshooting

Where is this configuration stored?

To see where this information is stored (--show-origin works on git version 2.8 or greater only), use:

$ git config --list --show-origin

On Windows git log, git diff, git branch or other git commands show no output at all

It seems this can be fixed by these configuration settings:

$ git config --global pager.log off
$ git config --global pager.diff off
$ git config --global pager.show off
$ git config --global pager.config off
$ git config --global pager.stash off
$ git config --global pager.help off
$ git config --global pager.blame off
$ git config --global pager.branch off
$ git config --global pager.annotate off

Following other manuals and documentation, it seems that all the above can be set with the following (cat should be available within Git Bash but also PowerShell):

$ git config --global core.pager cat

On Windows you see the warning “LF will be replaced by CRLF the next time Git touches it”

Solution is to set this:

$ git config --global core.autocrlf false