Setting Up Git
OverviewTeaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
How do I get set up to use Git?Objectives
gitthe first time it is used on a computer.
Understand the meaning of the
When we use Git on a new computer for the first time, we need to configure a few things. Below are a few examples of configurations we will set as we get started with Git:
- our name and email address,
- to colorize our output,
- what our preferred text editor is,
- and that we want to use these settings globally (i.e. for every project)
On a command line, Git commands are written as
verb is what we actually want to do. So here is how
Dracula sets up his new laptop:
$ git config --global user.name "Vlad Dracula" $ git config --global user.email "email@example.com" $ git config --global color.ui "auto"
Please use your own name and email address instead of Dracula’s. This user name and email will be associated with your subsequent Git activity, which means that any changes pushed to GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab or another Git host server in a later lesson will include this information.
For these lessons, we will be interacting with GitHub and so the email address used should be the same as the one used when setting up your GitHub account. If you are concerned about privacy, please review GitHub’s instructions for keeping your email address private.
If you elect to use a private email address with GitHub, then use that same email address for the
user.email value, e.g.
username with your GitHub one. You can change the email address later on by using the
git config command again.
He also has to set his favorite text editor, following this table:
|Text Wrangler (Mac)||
|Sublime Text (Mac)||
|Sublime Text (Win, 32-bit install)||
|Sublime Text (Win, 64-bit install)||
|Notepad++ (Win, 32-bit install)||
|Notepad++ (Win, 64-bit install)||
It is possible to reconfigure the text editor for Git whenever you want to change it.
vimis the default editor for for many programs, if you haven’t used
vimbefore and wish to exit a session, type
The four commands we just ran above only need to be run once: the flag
--global tells Git
to use the settings for every project, in your user account, on this computer.
You can check your settings at any time:
$ git config --list
You can change your configuration as many times as you want: just use the same commands to choose another editor or update your email address.
In some networks you need to use a proxy. If this is the case, you may also need to tell Git about the proxy:
$ git config --global http.proxy proxy-url $ git config --global https.proxy proxy-url
To disable the proxy, use
$ git config --global --unset http.proxy $ git config --global --unset https.proxy
Git Help and Manual
Always remember that if you forget a git command, you can access the list of command by using -h and access the git manual by using –help :
$ git config -h $ git config --help
git configto configure a user name, email address, editor, and other preferences once per machine.