Installing GIT

Installing GIT on your system

To work with the latest development sources, you need the git source control package.

Download and install the git source control tools

The usual way to get the very latest version of git is to browse the official GIT web site for a recent source package and follow the instructions to install.

However, here are a few possible shortcuts.

First determine whether you already have git installed. Try:

  $ git

which outputs a help page if git is installed properly.

On Fedora Core 6 (FC6) and similar Linux host distributions, you can use yum to find and install a working version of git:

  $ sudo yum install git

On FC3, yum doesn't know about git, so you have to do something like:

  $ cd /tmp
  $ lwp-download http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.3.1.tar.bz2
  $ tar xfj git-1.5.3.1.tar.bz2
  $ cd git-1.5.3.1
  $ make prefix=/usr/local all
  $ sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

and make sure /usr/local/bin is in your PATH. Unlike the other methods, however, the above sequence doesn't install git documentation. For that, you have to build doc and info make targets, which require first installing other packages such as asciidoc and others. Or, you can find documentation online (see below).

GIT Documentation

If git is fully installed, you should be able to get manual pages using man git and git help.

You can find online documentation such as a tutorial and manual pages.