Installing and Configuring Git Globally on Linux and macOS

Git is a widely-used Version Control System (VCS) in many modern development environments to track and handle file changes in your software projects. This guide will cover the installation and configuration of Git for a typical macOS-based development environment.

Git is a widely-used Version Control System (VCS) in many modern development environments to track and handle file changes in your software projects.

This guide will cover the installation and configuration of Git for a typical Linux or MacOS-based development environment.

For GitHub

Download and install GitHub Desktop. This will automatically install Git and a GUI application for GitHub.

For Everything Else

Linux and MacOS versions of the Git installer is maintained and available on the Git download page.

Configuring Git

Open your preferred terminal.

Tell Git your name so your commits will be properly labeled like this:

git config --global user.name "John Smith"

Tell Git the email address it should associate with your Git commits like this:

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Note: The email address you specify should match the one found in your email settings in GitHub, BitBucket etc.

Double-Checking

Just to make sure, you can verify the user.name configuration like this:

git config --global user.name
John Smith

And user.email like this:

git config --global user.email
[email protected]

And thats it!