Install Git

To use GitHub you need to install git on your local machine. Most Linux distributions will have it already installed by default. You can check this issuing the command which git on your Linux console. For other systems you can check it by simply typing git into the console and hit enter. If it is not available this will give you a "command not available" error. You can install make using your system package manager.

sudo apt-get install git

For Windows and Mac there are installable packages available here and here.

After the installation you should set up Git properly using the git config tool. The steps below assume you already created a github account.

• Set your user name for commits:

git config user.name "Your Name"

• Set E-Mail (use same as associated with your GitHub account):

git config user.email "you@provider.com"

• Password-Caching (With HTTPS):

git config credential.helper cache

git config credential.helper 'cache --timeout=3600'

If you are not familiar with Git, it is a good idea to go through a small tutorial. There is a nice interactive one from Code School which is called Try Git. It only takes round about 15 minutes to finish.