Git & GitHub#

Check whether you have installed already.

git --version

If not, follow the instructions for your OS and try running this commnd again. If your version of git is more than 18 months old (see releases), please update it.

Windows instructions:#

Install the GitHub Desktop Client. This comes with both a GUI client as well as the Git Bash terminal client which we will use during the course. In some instances Git Bash may need to be installed separately. In order to use conda with Git Bash follow the instructions here

You will need to create an account on GitHub. You can then sign-in to the GitHub Desktop Client which should automatically set-up SSH based authentication for the terminal client.

Configure the default terminal client (there are three different flavours of terminal on Windows: Windows CMD (DOS like), Windows Powershell, and BASH) to use BASH, as this most closely resembles the Linux and macOS terminal used by other students:

  1. In the Desktop Client, select Tools

  2. Then Options

  3. Default Shell

  4. Git Bash

You’ll know it has worked when you can open a Git Bash terminal; the window should have a title that starts with MINGW32 (scroll to the top of this page for how to check the git version).

macOS and Linux instructions:#

Installing Git on macOS

Install the XCode command-line-tools by opening a terminal and run the following.

xcode-select --install

and follow the on screen instructions. You may also install Xcode from the app store if you wish, but it is not needed. The XCode command line tools come with Git - please confirm you have installed it by running:

git --version
Installing Git on Linux

Install git via your distribution package manager (e.g. apt-get or yum), for example:

sudo apt-get install git

Check your version by running

git --version

To use git you will need to set up an account with your email address and name. To do this you can follow the Your Identity section of first time git setup.

You can check that they have been set correctly by running git config user.name and git config user.email. For the git module (Version Control with Git), you will also require access to GitHub.

Follow these instructions if you are working on macOS or Linux:

  1. Sign up, if you haven’t already

  2. Generate an SSH key pair

  3. Add the public key to your GitHub account and the private key to your computer’s keychain

  4. Lastly, you should test your SSH connection