Setting up Git and GitHub

Learning Objectives

• Understand how to set up Git on a new computer

• Configure Git with user information and preferred settings

• Learn to set up a text editor for use with Git

• Configure Git to use a specific branch naming convention

• Set up GitHub credentials using Personal Access Tokens (PATs) for secure communication with GitHub

Setting up Git

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.

• Our preferred text editor to use with Git.

We will also want to set these settings globally, meaning they’ll apply whenever we use Git within a given user account on a specific computer.

Username and email address

On a command line, Git commands are written as git <command> <options>, where <command> is what we actually want to do and <options> is additional optional information which may be needed for the <command>. To configure Git, settings, we use the ‘command’ config.

$ git config --global user.name "Joe Bloggs"
$ git config --global user.email "joe.bloggs@example.net"

This user name and email will be associated with your subsequent Git activity, which means that any changes pushed to GitHub (or another Git host server) from here on will include this information. If you work on public repositories with these services, then this information will be publicly visible.

For this course, 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.

Keeping your email private

If you elect to use a private email address with GitHub, then use that same email address for the user.email value. It will look something like nnnnnnnnn-username@users.noreply.github.com where nnnnnnnnn-username is your username prepended with a numerical ID.

The commands we just ran above only need to be run once: the flag --global tells Git to use the settings for every Git repository, in your user account, on this computer.

You can check your global settings at any time:

$ git config --global --list

Setting a text editor

Git will use a text editor installed on your computer when you need to write ‘commit messages’ (more about these later in the course). The default editor on most operating systems is set to Vim which, while powerful, is difficult to use if you’re not used to it. You can configure Git to instead use something you’re more familiar with. We recommend trying Nano for Git usage: it works at the command line, making it quick to write the short ‘commit messages’, but is much simpler to use than Vim. You can change this at any time if you find you’d prefer to use something else.

Git for Windows

If you followed the recommendations in the installation instructions for Git for Windows then Nano should already be the default editor used by Git.

The following table shows how to set the default editor for Git for several popular text editors. In some cases, you need to provide the path to the executable program for the editor — this indicated as path/to/executable-name (if you aren’t sure what to enter for this, do some online searching or try a search on your computer).

Editor	Configuration command
Atom	$ git config --global core.editor "atom --wait"
nano	$ git config --global core.editor "nano -w"
BBEdit (Mac, with command line tools)	$ git config --global core.editor "bbedit -w"
Sublime Text (Mac)	$ git config --global core.editor "'path/to/subl' -n -w"
Sublime Text (Win)	$ git config --global core.editor "'path/to/sublime_text.exe' -w"
Notepad (Win)	$ git config --global core.editor "path/to/notepad.exe"
Notepad++ (Win)	$ git config --global core.editor "'path/to/notepad++.exe' -multiInst -notabbar -nosession -noPlugin"
Kate (Linux)	$ git config --global core.editor "kate"
Gedit (Linux)	$ git config --global core.editor "gedit --wait --new-window"
Scratch (Linux)	$ git config --global core.editor "scratch-text-editor"
Emacs	$ git config --global core.editor "emacs"
Vim	$ git config --global core.editor "vim"
VS Code	$ git config --global core.editor "code --wait"

Default Git branch naming

Git (2.28+) allows configuration of the name of the branch created when you initialize any new repository. (We will cover repositories and branches later in the course; for now, you can think of a repository as a place where files for a project are kept and a branch just as a name for the development history of the files in the repository.)

By default, Git will create a branch called master whenever you start a new repository. However, there is a move in the software development community to stop using this term in favour of more inclusive language. Most Git code hosting services have transitioned to using main as the default branch; for example, any new repository that is opened in GitHub defaults to using main for the name of the branch.

At the time of writing, Git has not yet made the same change. For this course, we will manually configure Git to use the same main branch name as most cloud services.

For versions of Git 2.28 or later, this can be achieved by setting the init.defaultBranch setting to main globally:

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

For versions of Git prior to 2.28, the change can only be made on an individual repository level and we will cover this in the episode on making repositories later.

Exercise

Set up Git the way you’d like it by configuring settings for:

• Your username and password

• Your preferred text editor

• (Optional) Changing the default Git branch naming to main. If your version of Git is older than 2.28 then you won’t be able to do this yet.

Final notes on configuring Git

Changing configuration

You can change your configuration as many times as you want. Use the same commands as above to choose another editor, update your email address, etc.

Git Help and Manual

Always remember that if you forget the subcommands or options of a git command, you can access the relevant list of options typing git <command> -h, or access the corresponding Git manual by typing git <command> --help, e.g.:

$ git config -h
$ git config --help

While viewing the manual, remember the : is a prompt waiting for commands and you can press Q to exit the manual. More generally, you can get the list of available git commands and further resources of the Git manual typing:

$ git help

On line Endings

You can sometimes run into issues when using Git if you (or your team) use different machines when working on files. If you’ve followed the default installation instructions (particularly Windows users who are using Git for Windows) then you shouldn’t run into problems, but we include a note here in case you run into trouble.

As with other keys, when you hit Enter / ↵ / Return on your keyboard, your computer encodes this input as a character. Different operating systems use different character(s) to represent the end of a line. (You may also hear these referred to as newlines or line breaks.) Because Git uses these characters to compare files, it may cause unexpected issues when editing a file on different machines. You can change the way Git recognizes and encodes line endings using the core.autocrlf setting. The following settings are recommended:

• MacOS and Linux:

  $ git config --global core.autocrlf input
  

• Windows:

  $ git config --global core.autocrlf true
  

You can read more about this issue in the Pro Git book.

Setting up GitHub credentials

We’re going to be using Git to communicate with GitHub. To do this, we need to set up some authentication to enable us to do this securely. The approach we will adopt in this course is to use GitHub Personal Access Tokens (PAT). A PAT is a way for some application or service (such as Git) to identify itself as being authorised to interact with GitHub on your behalf. Part of setting up a PAT involves specifying the scope of what an application using that PAT is allowed to do on GitHub. PATs are generated via your GitHub account and then saved for later use.

Look after your PATs!

You should treat PATs with the same level of care you would your GitHub account password. Store the PAT somewhere secure, such as in a password manager. If you ever suspect a PAT has been exposed, then you should delete the token and generate a new one.

Note on classic tokens

At the time of writing, GitHub is in the process of creating newer, so-called ‘fine grained’ personal access tokens. These provide more fine grained control, but are still in a developmental phase. The older, ‘classic’, PATs are sufficient forour needs and simpler to set up, so we’ll use them throughout this course.

To set up a PAT, follow the instructions provided by GitHub for classic tokens. Note:

• You will need to set an expiration time on your token. This is part of the GitHub’s security and we strongly suggest you don’t select the No expiration option, however tempting it may be. You should get an email a few days before the token expires reminding you to regenerate it.

• As part of the process, you will need to select scopes for the token. All that is needed for this course (and likely for your standard, day-to-day use of Git) is to select the repo option: this will enable you to interact with repositories you have been invited to work on. More information about scopes can be found in the GitHub documentation on OAuth scopes.

• You can regenerate a PAT that has expired by going to your Personal access tokens (classic) as described in the link above, selecting the affected token and then clicking on Regenerate token.

• To delete a token (e.g. if you suspect it’s been compromised), go to your Personal access tokens (classic) as described in the link above and then click on Delete next to the token.

Exercise

Using the instructions on GitHub linked above, create a PAT and save it somewhere safe for later use in this course.

Summary Quiz