Git

Open-Source Version Control System

Written 2026/05/08

Whether you are developing a project on your own on a single machine or collaborating alongside others on the same codebase, Git is essential. Per its website, “Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.” The software was created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds (and others) as a version control system in the Linux ecosystem.

If you have ever worked on a group project that required any degree of coding, I imagine there may be a memory or two surfacing in your head involving emailing files back and forth as edits were being made. I no doubt have the same memories, emailing and slacking huge csv files, pickle files, and others with edits that, if I even found them, commonly messed up my own local changes. It was confusing, messy, and utterly unnecessary.

Enter Git. Git has the ability to eliminate all of those headaches, and the threshold to get started and relatively comfortable with the software is fairly low. There are countless commands, options and flags that Git has to offer, yet the goal of this guide is to introduce simply the most common and essential processes and commands that are more than sufficient to leverage the power of the software. Without further ado, let’s git ‘er done!

Installation

Whether you use Linux, Windows, or macOS, Git can be installed.

Linux: see install page for other kernels:

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt-get install git

# Arch
pacman -S git

macOS:

# must have homebrew installed
brew install git 

For Windows, it’s honestly simplest to just navigate to the installation page for Git and download from there. I used Windows for a long time and used Git Bash, I highly recommend it if you’re tied to Windows as it’ll help you get comfortable with Bash. Using Powershell isn’t very fun when everyone around you is using something else.

Setup

With Git present on your machine, you’ll want to set a few things before proceeding. All of your future commits will be tied to a username and email address, so those must be specified early.

Note: Moving forward, it is assumed that you’re using Bash or Zsh

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "email@example.com"

Use --global so that you just have to do this the one time on this specific machine. I have historically set the user.name as my github username, but your first and last name are probably better suited.

Much more to come…

References

https://git-scm.com/book/ms/v2/Getting-Started-First-Time-Git-Setup