Jake Ginnivan's blog

Setting Up Git

I have setup git many times for myself, and also team members. I thought I would just share the way I install and setup my Git environment on Windows.

I use Git Extensions as my Gui when I am not using the Command Line (which is my preference). It also is bundled with KDiff3 and MsysGit which means you only have to download one things.

Required Software

Tick both boxes (MsysGit and KDiff3)

Feature selection

I tend to disable Visual Studio integration. With VS 2013 you get native git support which will continue to get better over time. And I don’t need more menus…

Select SSH Agent

I prefer to go with OpenSSH, it is more work to setup, but once you have generated your ssh keys, put the .ssh folder into your dropbox or back it up, then you can just drop it back into your user profile when you reinstall windows or move to another computer.

KDiff Installation

Next Next Next Finish etc. :)

Git Installation

Select components

I leave this as the default

Adjust your PATH environment

I go for option 2 (Run git from the Windows Command Prompt), this sets up a reasonable default so you can access git from the command line anywhere

Line Endings

Option 3, Checkout as is, commit as is. Nobody likes it when you mess with their line endings.

Install PoshGit

Now you have git installed, open up a PowerShell console as Administrator and change directories to somewhere sensible that you want to put your code.

Then run:

  • Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned, this will allow you to run powershell scripts
  • git clone https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git
  • cd posh-git
  • .\install.ps1 - this will install posh-git into your profile.
  • . $PROFILE - this will run your profile, now you should see [master] in blue on the command line

You may have noticed a warning when you ran your profile WARNING: Could not find ssh-agent

To fix this, we need to change our PATH settings. Run control sysdm.cpl on the command line, go to the Advanced tab, click Environmental Variables The edit your PATH variable. When you click edit, you should see C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\cmd right at the end. Change this to C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin

Now when you restart your powershell console, you shouldn’t get a warning.

Creating your SSH Key

https://help.github.com/articles/generating-ssh-keys is a great resource for creating your SSH key, after you are done you should have a folder in your user profile called .ssh, and two files in that folder, id_rsa and id_rsa.pub.

Simply copy the contents of id_rsa.pub to your GitHub keys under your profile, now you can push/pull from github easily!

Git Config

And finally, here is my .gitconfig

[core]
autocrlf = false
editor = 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Notepad++/notepad++.exe'
[diff]
    tool = kdiff3
    guitool = kdiff3
[merge]
    tool = kdiff3
[mergetool "kdiff3"]
    path = C:/Program Files (x86)/KDiff3/kdiff3.exe
    keepBackup = false
    trustExitCode = false
[difftool]
    prompt = false
[mergetool]
    keepBackup = false
[difftool "kdiff3"]
    path = c:/Program Files (x86)/KDiff3/kdiff3.exe
[alias]
    st = status
    rc = rebase --continue

Hope that helps someone get started with Git

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