In this movie, we are going to learn how to install Git on Windows.
I'll be installing it on Windows 7, but the process will be similar for any version.
The first thing you need to know is where to find Git.
In the main Git web site, it's going to be at http://git-scm.com.
SCM stands for source code manager.
When you go to that web site, there will be a link that will allow you to
download and then install Git.
Before we do that though, I want to also mention another good resource to you,
which is that GitHub, one of the popular Git hosting companies, provides very
detailed step-by-step instructions with screenshots at this URL.
So if for any reason, things change in the future or if you get stuck, this
might be a good resource to help you get unstuck.
But I am also going to walk you through the install step-by-step.
So this is the Git web site, see git-scm.com up here in the URL, and when you go
to the page, at least at the moment, it has a link right here that detects that
I'm coming from Windows and offers to give me the latest stable release.
So this is the one that we could download, but instead of just clicking that
link, I want to show you that you can also click Downloads here, and you can see
all the different versions that are available for different operating systems,
we can click Windows, and then it will take us to that same page, the other one
was a shortcut to get to this page that would download Git for us.
We could see that it's offering to download Git-1.7.11-preview with a date after it .exe.
The version that it offers you may be different, go ahead and take whatever it
gives you, and don't let the fact that it says preview here, throw you at all.
The Windows version of Git is still considered to be beta software, it's very
stable, you shouldn't have any worries about using it, but it's still officially
considered beta software.
So it wants to know would we like to save this file, and we'll say yes, we
would like to save it.
It's doing a scan for viruses and download, and then now it has
actually downloaded. All right. So let's close that up.
I had my version of Firefox set to put all my downloads, in my Downloads folder
so that's where you can find this, you may have yours set to go somewhere else.
So here it is inside my Downloads folder. I am just going to double-click on that.
It's an exe file, Security Warning, we do want to run it, do we want to go ahead
and let them make changes, yes we do.
And now we have a Setup Wizard to help walk us through the process.
You are basically going to pick the defaults for everything, it's going to put
it in our Program Files x86, under GIT, that's great.
As far as what things to pick here, go ahead and just accept the defaults for everything.
Then it says it will create shortcuts, and it will call it Git, that's fine, and
as far as choosing our PATH environment, again we are going to choose the top
option Use Git Bash only.
Unless you know that you want to use another one, let's stick with the top one.
And then for line endings, now because Git is primarily UNIX-based, and that's
where sort of where it's got to start and a lot of users are still on UNIX.
The style of UNIX line endings in a text file is different from what Windows has.
So it wants to know how do you want to handle that difference.
The one you want to pick is the top one.
Basically, when we get files from Git, convert them to Windows style so that we
can use them in Windows, but then when we put things back for other people to
use we are going to use the UNIX style line endings.
So that's the polite way to do it unless you are working on a Windows only
project, in which case you might want to choose this last one, but I really
recommend that you try and go with this top one in most cases.
Okay, so now it's actually going to do the install for us, and it's all done, we can say Finish.
We are now done with the download.
You can see that it added Git Bash to my Desktop here, has some Release
Notes here that we can read, we won't worry about those right now, and now Git is installed.
So what is this Git Bash business over here?
We were supposed to be installing Git, and we got something called Git Bash.
Well, Bash is an environment in UNIX.
It's the environment that probably most UNIX users use.
So it's essentially like Git UNIX, and when we open this up, what it does is
it puts us into an environment that is very similar to the environment that
UNIX users will have. I am going to make my font a little bigger here.
We'll make my Window 24 point and Consolas, there we go, now it's bigger, that
will make it easier for you to see.
So now that we are here, this works just like UNIX, if you were in the Command
line in windows, you would see a directory listing by typing dir.
But we are using UNIX here so it's ls - la, and it will show us a listing of all
our files, exactly like you have in UNIX.
It's going to make it really easy for you to follow along because you can use
the exact same commands. Now we can see which version of Git we have.
Let's first type which git, that's a UNIX command again that shows where Git is
installed and located, and if we type git --version, it comes up and tells us
which version we have.
This msysgit is letting us know that it's the Windows version.
So we have now successfully installed Git on windows.
There is one additional note that I want to give you about Git Bash, which is at
least in the current version that I'm using of Git Bash, you don't have the
ability to copy and paste text.
So I can't, for example, select any of the text that's up here.
If I want to paste something in, you can't do it directly into the command
line, what you have to do is come up here and choose Edit and then choose Paste from here.
So if you see me doing paste from a text file into the command line, that's how
you're going to do it when you're working inside Git Bash.
Now that may be a feature that they'll fix in the future, but at least at the
moment copy-paste doesn't work the way it probably should.