Install software
Windows
If you are using a Windows operating system, the Git Bash software can be used.
If you have administrative access to your computer, you can download the Standalone Installer and run through the installation process to install the software on your computer. All of the defaults are fine, but is recommended to change the Configuring the terminal emulator to use with Git Bash option to Use Windows’ default console.
If you do not have administrative access to your computer, you can download the Portable edition. This is an executable, which when run will extract all the files required to run the software, and includes the required executables. For the purposes of this session, it is recommended to extract the files to the Desktop directory, which should result in a new directory named PortableGit on the desktop.
Apple MacOS
For MacOS, open the Terminal app and type:
git --version
then press Enter / Return. If this produces output similar to:
$ git --version
git version 2.47.1
Git is already installed.
If Git is not available follow the instructions to install the “command line developer tools”. Do not click “Get Xcode”, because that will take too long and is not necessary for our session.
After installing these tools, there won’t be anything in your /Applications folder, as they and Git are command line programs.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the most recent available installer labelled “snow-leopard” available here.
Linux
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to install it via your package manager.
For Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install git and for Fedora run sudo dnf install git.
Additional installation notes
There are various instructions available regarding the installation of the Git software:
The Software Carpentries notes on installing Git can be found in this section of the workshop template.
Initial working directory
We’ll do our work in the Desktop folder so make sure you change your working directory to it with:
$ cd
$ cd Desktop