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Monday, July 13, 2009

The Journey to Git, Part II—Git Started

This second post in my Git series will just cover setting up Git so that I can keep these things fairly short and well-organized. From here on, everything is very hands-on. If you're serious about learning Git, I highly recommend you follow along with all of the steps to reinforce what you're reading. This is all going to be a command line walkthrough, though Git ships with some nice GUI tools as well. Once you're familiar with the command line and the concepts, the GUI tools should be easy to figure out.

TOC

Articles in this series:

Note: This is something of a rough draft right now without many links for reference. After posting it initially and seeing how long it was, I decided to come back and break it up in order to not scare off readers with short attention spans. You know who you are.

Note: For extensive information about any git command, you can use "git help <command>" to see the man page for it. Alternately, just google "git <command>", and the first link will probably always be the kernel.org HTML version of the man page.

On with the show...

Installing

First, obviously, install Git. On Linux, it's a simple package installation. On Windows, you can use either msysgit or install the Git package in Cygwin. I've used msysgit only in passing. Most of my experience is evenly split between Cygwin and Ubuntu. The only other thing I'll say here is you do not want msysgit and Cygwin installed at the same time (which is why I didn't use msysgit much). The two are not compatible, and you'll likely see some odd behavior in Cygwin if you do it (like scp thinking your home directory is "c:\program file\msysgit"). If you need further details on installing Git, email me, and I'll try to help.

If Git is properly installed, then you should be able to run:

git --version

Configuring

There's some configuration we can get out of the way up front. This is all optional, in fact, but at least the first one is certainly a good idea. Your configuration tool in Git is "git config". By default, this command updates a repository's configuration, but with the "--global" flag, it sets options for your user system-wide, so we can set up some preferences before we even have a repo. For more info about the command and a full list of configuration options, see the man page for "git config".

Identify Yourself

Let Git know who you are with:

git config --global user.name "your name"
git config --global user.email "your email"

This name and email are included in the information about every commit that you make.

Pick an Editor

There are a few things that Git needs to open a text editor for, like typing commit messages if you don't want to type them in-line. Give it the path to your preferred editor with:

git config --global core.editor <path>
Pick a Merge Tool

For some reason, I've never gotten into graphical merge tools, preferring instead to just view the raw conflict markers, but I know some people wouldn't even glance at a VCS that didn't offer the option of merge GUIs. Git knows about several Linux merge tools, and if you want to use one of those, you can just use:

git config --global merge.tool <tool>

Built in merge tools are listed in the man page. If you want to use something other than the built-ins, which you probably will if you're on Windows, it's a bit more work. Assuming you're using WinMerge:

git config --global merge.tool winmerge
git config --global mergetool.winmerge.cmd "WinMergeU \$MERGED"

If WinMerge isn't on your path, you should be able to specify the path to it with:

git config --global mergetool.winmerge.path <path>

However I couldn't get that to work. It's fine if you just leave off the path option and add it to your system path.

For Windows

If you're using one of the Windows Git flavors, you'll very likely want to set these options to handle line terminators more gracefully:

git config --global core.autocrlf true
git config --global core.safecrlf true

And if you're using msysgit, you may need:

git config --global core.fileMode false

I had trouble with it that this option fixed.

There are tons more configuration options documented in the man page, but these should get you started. In the next post, we'll finally get to basic, day-to-day commands that will let you start using Git productively: Part III--The Basics

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