2.1 Installing Git

Before you can use GitHub effectively from your local machine, you need Git installed in your terminal environment.

Check whether Git is already installed¶

On many machines, Git is already available. You can check with:

git --version

If that command prints a version number, Git is installed. If not, you will need to install it.

Use the official installation instructions¶

The most reliable installation instructions are maintained by the Git project itself:

Git installation guide

That page covers macOS, Windows, and Linux.

After installation¶

Installing Git is only the first step. After Git is available, most contributors should immediately continue with:

1. setting user.name and user.email

2. choosing an editor

3. setting up authentication for GitHub

Those next steps are covered in Setting up Git with git config and Create GitHub account.

A beginner sanity check¶

After installation, verify that Git runs from the same terminal where you plan to do your development work. This matters because some users have multiple terminals, shells, or Python environments and assume Git is available everywhere when it is not.

Once git --version works and Git can be found in your normal shell, you are ready to continue.