Install and use Git and GitHub on Ubuntu Linux

Introduction to Git

Git is an open source version control software developed by Linus Torvalds in 2005 to help manage Linux(R) kernel development. As the documentation says:

Git is a fast, scalable, distributed version control system with an extremely rich command set that provides high-level operations and full access to the internal system.

Github is a treasure trove of some of the world's greatest software projects, generously contributed by developers all over the world. This seemingly simple but actually very powerful platform has been praised by the open source community for greatly helping developers who are interested in developing large-scale software.

This guide is a quick introduction to installing and using GitHub. It will also cover things like creating a local repository, how to link that local repository to a remote repository containing your project (so everyone can see your project), and how to commit changes and finally push all your local content to GitHub.

Please note that this guide assumes you have a basic understanding of Git terminology such as push, pull request (PR), commit, repository, etc. And hopefully you have successfully registered on GitHub and noted down your GitHub username, so let's get to the point:

1. Install Git on Linux

Download and install Git:

sudo apt-get install git

The above commands are for Ubuntu and should work on all recent versions of Ubuntu. They have been tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and should work on future versions as well.

2. Configure GitHub

Once the installation is complete, the next step is to configure the GitHub user details.

Git has a tool called git config that allows you to get and set configuration variables; these variables control various aspects of Git's appearance and operation. These variables can be stored in three different locations:

1./etc/gitconfig file: Contains values ​​applicable to all users and all repositories on the system. If you pass the '--system' option to git config, it will explicitly read and write this file.

2. ~/.gitconfig file: specific to your user. You can make Git read or write this specific file by passing the --global option.

3. The config file located in the git directory (that is, .git/config): No matter what library you are currently using, it specifically points to that single library. Each level overrides the value of the previous level. Therefore, a value in .git/config overrides the same value in /etc/gitconfig.

On Windows systems, Git looks for a .gitconfig file in your $HOME directory (for most people, this is C:\Documents and Settings\$USER). It also looks for /etc/gitconfig, although it is relative to the Msys root directory. This is probably wherever you decided to install Git when you ran the installer in Windows.

Use the two commands below, making sure to replace user_name with your own GitHub username and email_id with the email address you used to create your GitHub account.

git config --global user.name "user_name"
git config --global user.email "email_id"

The image below shows an example of how to configure the above command with my GitHub username: “akshaypai” and my email address “[email protected]”.

3. Create a local warehouse

Create a directory on your system. It will be used as a local repository and later it will be pushed to the remote repository on GitHub. Please use the following command:

git init Mytest

If the directory is created successfully, you will see something like this:

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/akshay/Mytest/.git/

This line may vary depending on your system.
Here, Mytest is the created directory and init converts it into a GitHub repository. Change the current directory to this newly created directory.

cd Mytest

4. Create a README file to describe the repository

Now create a README file and enter some text like "this is git setup on linux". README files are generally used to describe what the repository is used to hold or what the project is about. For example:

gedit README

You can use any text editor. I like using gedit. The contents of the README file can be:

This is a git repo

5. Add files in the repository to an index

This is a very important step. Here we will add all the content that needs to be pushed to GitHub to an index. These contents might include text files or applications that you add to the repository for the first time, or they might be edits to existing files (an updated version of a file).
Now that we have a README file, let's create another file, such as a simple C program, let's call it sample.c. The file contents are:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("hello world");
return 0;
}

Now we have two files. README and sample.c.
Add them to the index using the following command:

git add README
git add smaple.c

Note that the git add command can add any number of files and directories to the index. Here, when I say "index", I mean a buffer with a certain amount of space that stores all the files or directories that have been added to the Git repository.

6. Add the changes made to the index

Once all the files are added, you can submit. This means that you have finalized the file changes (or additions), and now they are ready to be uploaded to our own repository. Please use the command:

git commit -m "some_message"

"some_message" in the above command can be some simple message like "my first commit" or "edited the readme file", etc.

7. Create a repository on GitHub

Create a repository on GitHub. Please note that the name of the repository must be exactly the same as the name of the repository you created locally. In this case it is "Mytest". Please log in to your GitHub account first. Click the "+" symbol in the upper right corner of the page and select "create nw repository". Fill in the details as shown below and click on “create repository”.

Once created, we can push the local repository to your repository on GitHub. Use the following command to connect to the repository on GitHub:

Please note: Make sure to replace “user_name” and “Mytest” in the path with your GitHub username and directory name before running the following commands!

git remote add origin https://github.com/user_name/Mytest.git>

8. Push the files in the local repository to the GitHub repository

The last step is to push the contents of the local repository to the remote repository (GitHub) using the following command:

git push origin master

Type your login name and password when prompted

The following image shows the process from step 5 to step 8.

The above pushes all the contents (files) in the Mytest directory to GitHub. For future projects or when creating a new repository, you can start directly from step 3. Finally, if you log in to your GitHub account and click on your Mytest repository, you will see that the two files: README and sample.c have been uploaded and displayed as shown below:

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