Install Git and start using it like a Pro (Meet Git #2)

How to install Git step by step

6 min readOct 7, 2022

In the previous article¹, we were considering Git as a tool that can be successfully used in areas other than software development. If you missed that article, or you don’t know what Git is, I encourage you to check it out.

Today I’m going to show you how to install Git, as it might not be that obvious, especially if you’re doing it for the first time.

Get the installer

Visit the official website² and click on the appropriate link, depending on whether you are using Windows, Linux or Mac.

Git official website with available installers

Install Git for Windows

On Windows, to get started with Git, you can:

Install Git from a downloaded installer
Use a portable version that doesn’t require installation
Install Git by using winget, which is a command-line tool (this won’t be covered in this article, however)

The latter is especially useful when you have a Windows account with limited permissions, and you can’t install software on your own (a company laptop is a good example here).

Given you want to install Git, get the installer, run it, and follow the instructions on the screen. Essentially, keep default settings on most screens, with a few exceptions. I will cover these exceptions in next paragraphs.

Standalone and portable versions of Git for Windows

Bash profile for Windows Terminal

On the screen with the selection of components, I would also recommend selecting “Add a Git Bash Profile to Windows Terminal”.

This option may be useful, if your Windows comes with Windows Terminal. If you don’t have it, you can install this tool from Microsoft Store, but this is completely up to you. Keep in mind that Git comes with its own command line, called Git Bash, so you’ll be able to use Git even if you omit this checkbox.

Besides that, you can create a profile within Windows Terminal for Git Bash manually at any time, so don’t worry too much about this setting.

During Git installation, you can integrate Git with Windows Terminal

Windows Terminal available on Microsoft Store

Git installer can create a convenient profile in Windows Terminal

The default Git Bash for those who don’t use Windows Terminal

Choosing the default text editor

The next setting worth considering is a text editor associated with Git. Using Git requires writing some text, and because Git is not a text editor itself, we have to choose our favorite tool. The default Git’s text editor, Vim, is quite powerful, but it can give you a headache if this is your first contact with this editor. I remember myself boxing with Vim, because it turned out that even such a simple operation as closing the application is challenging enough for newcomers.

If you’re not tech-savvy, or you don’t want to spend your time to learn another tool, select the text editor you are familiar with. I personally stick to Vim, but it’s just a matter of taste, and you can change your choice at any time.

Basically, you can control this setting by changing a property managed by Git, named core.editor — I’ll show you how to change this and other settings in the next article, when we’ll be configuring Git for our first repository.

By default, Vim is the text editor you will use along with Git

Configuring the line endings

Because Git is a tool that primarily operates on text files, Git wants to know how it is supposed to act on text files and their line endings.

If you’re installing Git on Windows, it’s most likely you want to keep the default setting “Checkout Windows-style, commit Unix-style line endings”.

Keep this setting as-is for now — I will explain the differences between these options in one of the next articles. This behavior can be configured at any time via the core.autocrlf property.

The default line endings in Git for Windows

Configuring extras

The settings below are completely optional, and they don’t affect your workflow, but it’s worth to select them for better overall performance.

On the “Configuring extra options” and “Configuring experimental options” screens, select

“Enable file system caching” (the property stored in Git as core.fscache)
“Enable experimental built-in file system monitor” (the property stored as core.fsmonitor)

Enable file system caching for a performance boost

Enable built-in file system monitor to speed up Git operations

When you’ve finally gone through the wizard…

Click the “Finish” button, open “Start” menu, and search for “Git Bash”. If the installation was successful, you’ll see a command line as shown below.

At last! The Windows installer is a bit long, but it does a lot of setup for us.

On Windows, Git Bash can be found in the Start menu

This is how your command center looks like (Git Bash)

Use Git Portable

Like I wrote earlier, if you don’t want to (or you can’t) install the standalone version of Git, you can go for Git Portable.

To do so, follow these simple steps:

Get the file with Git Portable (as of October 5, 2022, there is a .7z archive to download)
Extract the archive with a tool that supports .7z, like 7-zip³
Run git-bash.exe from the extracted directory
Voilà!

You can extract the .7z archive containing Git Portable by using 7-zip

Once you extracted the archive, find the git-bash.exe binary and run it

Install Git on Linux

Installation of Git on Linux is a much more straightforward process compared to Git for Windows, but this has also some drawbacks, i.e. you need to do additional configuration yourself.

In the next article, I’m going to explain how to configure Git when you don’t have such a fancy wizard as Windows users have.

Git on Ubuntu

In order to install Git on Ubuntu, perform these two steps:

Open terminal
Type git --version, and if the message says something like “Command ‘git’ not found”, proceed to the next step
Type: sudo apt install git, and confirm by hitting y on your keyboard

To verify that Git has been installed, type againgit --version — if everything is fine, this time you should see the version of installed Git.

Git on Fedora

The installation process on Fedora is almost identical to the one on Ubuntu. The main difference is the package manager, i.e. Fedora comes with dnf, whereas Ubuntu uses apt.

Fedora is smart enough, so that when you type git --version in the terminal, and Git is not installed, you’ll be asked to install a suggested package containing Git. This is very convenient, and you just have to confirm the installation by hitting y on your keyboard.

Alternatively, you can type the full command, similarly as on Ubuntu: sudo dnf install git

Fedora even suggests a package where Git can be found

Git on macOS

In general, there are several ways to install Git on Mac, and the easiest way is to download the installer from this website⁴. Then, run the installer and follow the instructions on the screen.

What’s next?

Congratulations! You’ve just installed Git on your machine, and you’re almost ready to use it.

Wait, almost? Well, we need to learn how to check the initial configuration, and how to make some adjustments in settings. Fortunately, I’ll teach you all of this in the next part, so stay tuned!