Git Intro for Librarians: Setup

If you haven’t done so already, to follow this lesson you will need to:

1. Create a free GitHub account and confirm your email.
2. Download and install Git for your operating system: https://git-scm.com/downloads (Note: Git for Windows comes bundled with the Git BASH terminal that allows you to use UNIX-style commands on Windows)
3. Configure Git by opening a terminal window and entering the following commands:

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

This user name and email will be recorded with each commit in the history of your repositories. The email address should be the same one you used when setting up your GitHub account.

By default, Git will open the Vi / Vim text editor to request commit messages (for example when merging conflicts). To avoid confusion, most people will want to change the default editor to something more familiar using the core.editor config. Any text editor can be made default by adding the correct file path and command line options (see GitHub help). However, the simplest core.editor values are "notepad" on Windows, "edit -w" on Mac, and "nano -w" on Linux. For example:

$ git config --global core.editor "notepad"