Installing Git

Linux

The easiest way to install Git on a linux operating system is to use your package management tool, such as apt (for Debian-based systems such as Ubuntu) or yum (for Fedora).

See Download for Linux and Unix.

Note that "git-all" is a meta-package including git and all of it's subpackages, such as emacs support, a web interface and so on. See git-all for details.

Windows

There are two good options for installing Git on windows:

Git for Windows

This project focuses on providing the full Git featureset for windows users in a lightweight interface. You can find it at git-for-windows.

GitHub Desktop

This is more focused on integration with GitHub, and comes with a flashy user interface as well as a solid set of tools. You can find it at GitHub Desktop. In my experience this is slower and more resource-heavy than Git for Windows.

Note that both installers above include a graphical user interface but we're going to concentrate on using the command-line version as it's quicker, in many ways easier, and certainly uses less system resources.

Mac OSX

There are several ways of installing Git on a Mac:

Via Xcode Command Line Tools

You may already have this installed. Try opening Terminal and typing:

git

If you haven't got it installed already then it will prompt you to install it.

Via the Git website

This version will provide you with the most recent maintained (eg stable) build of git and will likely be more up to date than that provided as part of Xcode. Download it from git-scm.com.

GitHub Desktop

GitHub provide a mac version of their GitHub desktop product. You can find it at GitHub Desktop.

Note that both installers above include a graphical user interface but we're going to concentrate on using the command-line version as it's quicker, in many ways easier, and certainly uses less system resources.