Setting up Git

If you don’t already have a GitHub account, go to https://github.com/ and sign up (this is completely free unless you want to use a paid version of GitHub). Once you have a GitHub account, open a command shell and enter:

$ git --version

If you already have Git installed then a version number should appear. If your computer doesn’t recognize this command then consult this guide on installing Git for your machine.

Once Git is installed, you can alter its settings by changing configuration variables with the “git config” command (see this article). If this is your first time using Git on the command line, you will need to set the “user.name” and “user.email” configuration variables to your GitHub username and email so that Git command line is linked to your account. You can do this by entering the following commands:

$ git config --global user.name = "your username"
$ git config --global user.email = [your github email account]

The global flag makes these the default values for anything you do on the machine (see this article). These are the only configuration variables that you are required to alter to use Git. For more information on configuring Git see this Git documentation.