Introduction to Version Control with Git and GitHub

Learn to use version control to manage your software development and collaborate effectively with others.

Home Code of Conduct Schedule Installation Guide Course Notes Resources

In order to fully participate in this course, you should make sure you have the following in place before the first workshop.

An installation of Git on your computer.
A GitHub account.
A text editor or integrated development environment (IDE) to use for working with source code / text files. Visual Studio Code is recommended as it will be used during the workshop sessions, but you can use another program if you prefer; see the discussion below for more information.

This page gives more details on these requirements.

Please note that installing software, such as Git or a text editor, may require administrative privileges. If you need support due to not having these privileges on your computer then please contact the University’s IT department.

For those struggling to install the required software or sign up to GitHub, there will be an opportunity to get support from the course organisers in drop-in sessions shortly before the start of the course. The time available in these sessions is limited, so please only attend if you have already tried following the instructions below.

Installing Git

You should first check whether you have Git installed on your computer, according to your operating system:

Windows: Search for the application Git Bash on your computer. (You can open up a new search by pressing the Windows and S keys together.) If you find Git Bash as an application, then you already have Git installed.
MacOS & Linux: Open a terminal and run the command git --version. If you get a response that looks something like
```
git version 2.25.1
```
then you have Git installed (your version number may differ). On the other hand, if you get a response that says something like
```
Command 'git' not found
```
then Git is not installed.

If you don’t have Git installed then you will need install it. Instructions and recommended sources for doing this are provided below, according to operating systems.

Windows

Download and install the latest version of Git for Windows from https://git-scm.com/download/win. Accept the default settings while running the installer, with the following optional exceptions:

On the Select Components pane, you may wish to select the option to Check daily for Git for Windows updates. Selecting this will mean Git for Windows will tell you when a new update for it is available.
On the Choosing the default editor used by Git pane, you can select a different text editor that will be used to write ‘commit messages’ in Git. The default text editor, Vim, is difficult to use if you’re not used to it. Nano is a much simpler text editor that works from the command line, so our recommendation would be to switch to that. The choice of text editor can be changed later once Git is installed, so you’re not tied in by your choice here.

Mac OS

We recommend installing Git through the Xcode Command Line Tools. This is a collection of software, curated by Apple, that is useful for developing code on MacOS; Git is one of the programs included. Daniel Kehoe has a very good guide on the Xcode Command Line Tools. Daniel’s guide recommends installing the Homebrew package manager at the same time as the Xcode Command Line Tools, however this is not required for installing Git, so we instead recommend following the version of his instructions that avoids installing Homebrew.

Linux

Install Git using your operating system’s package manager. See https://git-scm.com/download/linux for instructions.

Get a GitHub account

To set up an account, go to https://github.com/ and click on Sign Up in the top right-hand corner. Make sure you know your username and password for the start of the course!

Text editors / IDEs

You should also have a text editor or integrated development environment (IDE) installed on your computer, to give you a means of editing text files and source code. Throughout this course we will be using Visual Studio Code (a.k.a. VS Code) because it has nice integration with Git (it’s also free and works on most operating systems). One or two parts of the course will use features in VS Code to better visualise what is going on with Git (such as visualising differences between file versions), so you will likely find it simplest to use VS Code to follow along in this course.

However, if you don’t want to use VS Code then you can use whatever text editor / IDE you feel comfortable with. Examples include:

Notepad++
Sublime Text
Emacs
RStudio (includes Git integration)
PyCharm (includes Git integration)
(At the command line) Vim, Nano

You may wish to see if your preferred text editor / IDE has integrations with Git, or if there are plugins or other extensions that add capabilities for working with Git from within your text editor / IDE.

Installing VS Code

Head to https://code.visualstudio.com to download and install VS Code for your operating system. Windows users can also install it from the Microsoft Store.