Installing Git on Windows

Resources

• Git Installers
• Install Git from GitHub Git Guides
• GitHub Desktop
• Adding a new SSH Key to your GitHub Account from GitHub

Video Script

Hello and welcome to the first of a series of videos where I’m going to show you everything you need to know to be able to bring your CC 410 projects and other Computational Core projects outside of Codio and onto your local system. For these videos, I’m doing this all on Windows, which is the most complicated system to set up. For Mac and Linux users, there are similar things that you can do on those systems. If you want me to cover those in a future video, just let me know, and I’d be happy to do that, or you can find really good documentation online. In this video, we’re going to go through installing the Git tool on Windows and also how we can connect it to GitHub and download our projects using Git. So let’s get started with that.

On this system, I have a relatively recent version of Windows 10 that is fully updated, and I have downloaded a lot of the tools that we’re going to need for this project. The first tool I’ve downloaded is the Git tool which is available from the Git website. This is the 64-bit Windows Installer version, and I’m briefly going to go through the process of installing that tool. The Git installer presents many different options that you can choose from here, I’m going to make sure I choose the options for Windows Explorer integration, as well as the default associations. If you use the new Windows terminal, you can also check mark this option to have Git Bash added directly to your Windows terminal. Git will also ask you what you want to use as the default text editor. It defaults to the vim option, which I find to be the most difficult editor to use. If you have one of these other text editors installed, you can choose that or if nothing else, I’m going to choose the nano editor, which we’ve seen in Codio, to use that by default. You can also let Git decide whether it should use the name “master” for the default branch or a different branch names such as “main,” I’m going to go ahead and choose this option for it to use the “main” branch for any new projects that it creates. Likewise, Git gives you the option to use Git from Git Bash only or from third party software or from other tools, I’m going to choose the recommended option to allow me to use Git from the command line and also from third party software. We’re also going to choose to use the openSSH that is bundled in the Git installer instead of an external version. We will do the same with the openSSL library. We’ll also choose to check out Windows style line endings, but commit Unix style line endings. This makes our repositories a lot more compatible between Windows and Linux versions. And it makes it easier for Windows text editors to edit these files. We’ll allow Git to use minTTY as the default terminal and will use all of the other default behaviors. Once we’ve selected that, Git will go through the process of installing and we can move on to the next step.

Once Git has finished installing, I can check mark the option to launch Git Bash, which will let us load the Git terminal and we can make a couple other adjustments. The default Git Bash window looks an awful lot like a Linux terminal. It’s a small version of Linux that runs within Windows to make things easier to work with, although all of these Git commands will also work in the default Windows command prompt and in PowerShell. As with any Git installation, the first thing we need to do is configure our name and our email address using the Git configuration options. Once we run these two commands, Git will be configured with our username and our email address, which will get attached to any commits that we make. Now we need to generate an SSH key so that we can connect it to GitHub and be able to access our repositories directly. To do that, we’ll use the command ssh-keygen. And then we’ll simply press Enter for all of the options. Once it’s done, it will generate an SSH key for us. We can find that key by typing cat .ssh/id_rsa.pub. This is the SSH public key that we will copy and paste into GitHub so that we can access those files directly.

At this point, I’m going to close Git Bash, and I’m going to instead open PowerShell. Here in PowerShell, if we installed Git correctly, we should also have access to the Git command here. It looks like it’s working. So now I’m going to use Git to check out a couple of our CC 410 projects so that we can use those in the later videos. For the rest of the videos in the series, I’m going to use the model solutions for example nine in CC 410. So to check those out, I’m going to do git clone, followed by the SSH URL of that repository, and I’m cloning it directly into my home folder. There we go. That’s all it takes to install Git on Windows. In the next videos we’ll look at installing either Python or Java and configure using an IDE for each of those languages.