Level533

Download the installer from git-scm.com. Use a 64 bit version for a 64 bit operating system. The install sequence and comments are detailed below.

Information

Select Destination Location

Select Components

• Uncheck Associate .sh files to be run with Bash if you have other Bash environments such as Cygwin installed.
• Check Use a TrueType font in all console Windows if you want a nicer font in your Git-Bash terminal.

Using a TrueType font for the Git-Bash console will better display Unicode characters.

Select Start Menu Folder

Choosing the Default Editor Used By Git

Vim comes bundled with the install and is available in Git-Bash. You may change the default editor later.

$ git config --global core.editor "'C:/Program Files/Notepad++/notepad++.exe' -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin"

The above changes the editor to Notepad++ for in the user’s global configuration.

Do not try to use MS Word or WordPad, the configuration needs to be in plain text. Use a UTF-8 without the UTF-8 BOM encoding for the text format.

Adjusting you PATH Environment

Choosing HTTPS Transport Backend

This sets the git http.sslBackend setting and this can changed later. The top radio sets the system value to openssl. The bottom radio sets this to schannel for using the Windows Certificate store. This options can always be changed on a system, per user, or per project basis later.

This option only needs to be set to schannel if custom SSL certificates are used for accessing remote repos using HTTPS.

It is advised to go with the default OpenSSL and only switch to the other on a per project basis when needed. You can always change this later.

Configuring the Line Ending Conversions

This sets the system Git core.autocrlf config option.

Configuring the Terminal Emulator To Use With Git Bash

The seconds option is not advised here. If you want to use Git from something other than a Bash shell, use the posh-git module from the PowerShell Gallery and use Git from PowerShell.

PowerShell with posh-git still does not work as well as Git-Bash. If you insist on using Git from cmd.exe, find a good therapist.

Configuring Extra Options

I’ve not had the need to use symbolic links in any of my Git project. If needed, this option can be set later by setting the Git core.symlinks to true. Remember to set the SeCreateSymbolicLink permission for the user accounts needing this.

Sometimes you may need to keep code in a Git repo, but don’t have a nice web based backend like GitHub available yet to push your source into. A workaround can be to start with a file based repo that you can later easily push to a backend when you have one available. While you won’t have the nice web based repository view associated with many of these backends, you at least get the full Git command line.

All you need is the Git command line client to get started. Windows users can get it from git-scm.com and then use the Git-Bash command line client to manage their Git repositories.

At the time of this writing, I was using the StefanScherer/windows_10 VM image for VirtualBox from Vagrant Cloud, hence the vagrant user in the example paths.

Linux users can install Git from their distro; using the Git-Bash console in Windows has the same look and feel as Linux users using Git from Bash.

$ mkdir -p ~/repos/my-project
$ cd ~/repos/my-project
$ git init --bare

For Windows 10 users, this created a directory in your home folder for the vagrant account C:\Users\vagrant\repos\my-project. Next, figure out where you want to checkout your code to.

mkdir ~/projects
cd ~/projects
git clone file:///c/Users/vagrant/repos/my-project

This gave us a checkout directory in C:\Users\vagrant\projects\my-project. You may get the “warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.” message, nothing wrong here as this is exactly what you just did.

In the directory where you cloned the empty repo, you add files from an existing project or create new ones, whatever- this is your development directory. Then when your are ready for your initial push:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m 'initial revision'
$ git push

You have just done your first push to your upstream file based repo in C:\Users\vagrant\repos\my-project. You work with it just like one cloned from a backend like GitHub.

Pushing To Remote Backend

When your backend is set up and you are ready to push to a remote repository, just create a new repository on your backend. Using the remote URL, push the bare file based repo as shown in the example below:

$ cd ~/repos/my-project
$ git push --mirror git@mybackend.com/someusername/my-project.git

The URI following –mirror will different, depending on where and what your backend is.