Installing git is easy with operating system provided packages like apt or dnf. We can track here Fedora way with dnf but it is very similar for other operating systems like CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu etc.
$ dnf install git -y Failed to set locale, defaulting to C Last metadata expiration check: 1:28:52 ago on Thu Oct 6 08:01:17 2016. Dependencies resolved.
First-Time Configuration
After installing git making some configuration will make usage of the git more easy. System wide configuration is held in /etc/gitconfig
.
But more practical configuration can be done in the users home directory. .gitconfig
file stores user wide configuration and this configuration is used by all projects if project wide configuration is not exists.
$ cat .gitconfig [user] name = John Doe email = jdoe@poftut.com
And project specific configuration is held in the .git/config
file.
User Configuration
As there will be a lot of commit in big repositories user tracking is important. We can set our name and email for the project but setting them globally will make it more practical because we are busy developers and programming a lot of different projects 😉
$ git config --global user.name "John Doe" $ git config --global user.email "jdoe@poftut.com" $ git config -l user.name=John Doe user.email=jdoe@poftut.com core.repositoryformatversion=0 core.filemode=true core.bare=false core.logallrefupdates=true
We set our user name with config command for the –global and providing username and email values with user.name and user.email . After setting user info we can check with config -l command.
Checking Configuration
Existing configuration can be listed with config
command like below.
$ git config --list user.name=John Doe user.email=jdoe@poftut.com
--list
is used to list configuration
Getting Help
Before starting to work with git knowing how to get help from git is better.
$ git usage: git [--version] [--help] [-C <path>] [-c name=value] [--exec-path[=<path>]] [--html-path] [--man-path] [--info-path] [-p | --paginate | --no-pager] [--no-replace-objects] [--bare] [--git-dir=<path>] [--work-tree=<path>] [--namespace=<name>] <command> [<args>] These are common Git commands used in various situations: start a working area (see also: git help tutorial) clone Clone a repository into a new directory init Create an empty Git repository or reinitialize an existing one work on the current change (see also: git help everyday) add Add file contents to the index mv Move or rename a file, a directory, or a symlink reset Reset current HEAD to the specified state rm Remove files from the working tree and from the index examine the history and state (see also: git help revisions) bisect Use binary search to find the commit that introduced a bug grep Print lines matching a pattern log Show commit logs show Show various types of objects status Show the working tree status grow, mark and tweak your common history branch List, create, or delete branches checkout Switch branches or restore working tree files commit Record changes to the repository diff Show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc merge Join two or more development histories together rebase Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head tag Create, list, delete or verify a tag object signed with GPG collaborate (see also: git help workflows) fetch Download objects and refs from another repository pull Fetch from and integrate with another repository or a local branch push Update remote refs along with associated objects 'git help -a' and 'git help -g' list available subcommands and some concept guides. See 'git help <command>' or 'git help <concept>' to read about a specific subcommand or concept.
As we see that git has a lot of commands for different purposes but we will use only some of them in this tutorial. If we need to remember some commands we can use this help.
Initialize git Repository
Repository is the location where directory and related files reside. If we list files in the initialized path we can see that a hidden directory named .git is created. It is the core where magic happens.
$ ls -al total 12 drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 6 09:30 . drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Oct 6 09:30 .. drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Oct 6 09:30 .git