Installation and setup

To work with this tutorial, you’re going to need a few things:

• Git, of course. Install this by going to the git homepage, git-scm.com. On Linux, you probably already have git, or you can install it with sudo apt-get install git-all or sudo yum install git.
• A graphical git client or browser. This lets you visualise your git history more easily, and understand the concepts behind git better. For a full list of clients, see here. On Mac, I recommend Git Tower, though it’s not free. The cross-platform SourceTree is free and available on Windows and Mac. On Linux, try gitg or gitk.
• A text editor. Try Sublime Text or Atom (both of which are multiplatform). Configure them to be your default git editors by following the instructions on this page. Note: programs like Microsoft Word or TextEdit are not valid text editors here because they don’t produce plain text files, but rather more elaborate file formats that include text formatting information.
• A GitHub account. Create an account by going to github.com.
• SSH keys to access GitHub. Without these, you will need to type your GitHub password every single time you try to do read from or write to your GitHub account. (Which will be many, many times! ;) Follow the instructions here, making sure that you are seeing the instructions for your OS (Mac, Windows, or Linux).

Notes

When typing a passphrase, it might seem that the keyboard isn’t working. However, this is just a security feature (similar to the *s you might see when typing a password on the web). Just go ahead and type the passphrase, then repeat it as requested.

For Windows users: Windows does not have an ssh agent running in the background by default. If you see the error:

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa
Could not open a connection to your authentication agent.

you will need to use this command to start the ssh-agent:

$ eval `ssh-agent -s`

(Be careful to use the proper backtick symbol, usually just above the “Tab” key on most keyboards; NOT the single quote/apostrophe character.)

Then type:

$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa

(You might need to change the filename from id_rsa to the whatever you used.) See this StackOverflow answer for more info.

You need to keep the window on which you launched the ssh-agent open.

Setup

Additionally, you’ll want to set up git so that it knows your full name and email address. Fire up a console/terminal, and type:

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

(Use the same email you used for your GitHub account.)

The following command also lets you see a rudimentary graphic of your history without needing a GUI git client:

$ git config --global alias.lsd "log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --all"

Then you can get a nice history within your terminal by typing:

$ git lsd

Whew! That’s quite a lot of stuff! But I hope by the end of the tutorial you’ll find it all useful and worth getting! (Plus: free stuff!)