Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
git is a software program much like MS Word or Google Chrome but it is part of a class of programs known as cli tools. This program does not have a UI like most programs we are familiar with but instead is accessible primarily through our command line/terminal.
Being accessible primarily only through the command line/terminal sounds like a huge restriction but it allows us as developers to use it for what it's good at and for it to then quickly go away. So what does git do? Well it is a Version Control System or VCS. It keeps track of a set of files over time.
Each time changes are wanting to get recorded, they are wrapped in what we call a 'commit' and that commit is saved to the repo as a snapshot of the files at that time. The tracking and reconciling abilities that git has to handle conflicts makes git an effective tool for many developers to work on the same codebase at the same time as well as to record the history of a project in the case an issue is introduced.
Github is a company that provides hosting for git repos. It works together with the git cli tools to manage the codebase by making or deleting branches, creating pull requests, and sharing the git project with other developers.
If you have WSL already setup and are using an Ubuntu distribution, you already have git within linux! If you are using a different distribution you may need to manually install git.
While we don't need git installed in Windows, we do want to have the git-credential-manager-core installed. It comes bundled with git so we can easily install it in Windows by using the installer found here.
Once you've downloaded one of the "Git for Windows Setup" distributions (either 32-bit or more likely 64-bit) you can launch the installer and accept all the defaults.
Now that git-credential-manager-core is installed, we can restart our terminal and continue on working through this guide.
Mac comes with some tools by default. git is one that we want to make sure is up to date so we can run the following in our terminal.
xcode-select --installOnce you have installed git, configure the information that gets logged for each
of your commits by updating the default (global) credentials that git uses. (You
could overwrite these credentials temporarily per local repo. While that
shouldn't be necessary when working on App Academy projects, it is helpful to
know that it is an option.) You will also want to set the default branch to
main.
In your terminal (on Mac or WSL), run
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "Your Email"
git config --global init.defaultBranch mainAs previously mentioned, Github provides a mechanism to share code with other developers. Because of the nature of code, there needs to be a way to authenticate to make sure that someone is authorized to fetch or contribute new code.
Thankfully for us, git handles this authentication flow automatically but for Github, we can't use our Github accounts password. Instead, we can use a Personal Access Token as a password to authenticate to Github and save it in a password manager of sorts so we don't have to use the PAT every command that requires auth.
Before we get a PAT from Github and use it for auth - we should setup our Secrets Manager.
WSL doesn't have a password manager by default in most distributions so we would need to install one if we don't want our token saved in plain text or only temporarily in memory. Thankfully, we can actually tell git to use Windows Credential Manager. Just run the following command in WSL:
git config --global credential.helper "/mnt/c/Program\ Files/Git/mingw64/libexec/git-core/git-credential-manager-core.exe"We now have WSL trying to use the git-credential-manager-core to facilitate our credentials management.
MacOS has a built in password/secret manager called keychain. We can tell git to use keychain with the following line in our terminal:
git config --global credential.helper osxkeychainOnce our secret manager is setup, we want to restart our terminal/WSL Shell. Once restarted, we want to do two things. Generate a token from Github, and use that as our authentication for a privileged command.
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To get a new token, navigate to Personal access tokens in Github settings. You can navigate there yourself by going to
settings > Developer settings > Personal Access Tokens. -
Once here, click Generate new token.
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Give your token a descriptive name. I name it for what device I will use the token from. This way, all of my computers have their own unique token and if I ever need to, I can revoke a token. We also want to use this menu to set when our token expires and give it the allowed permissions. For our purposes we want to at least have all the repo permissions.
Once we have our token ready to generate, we want to try running a privileged command in git so we get a password prompt. Once we click Generate token at the bottom of the new token form we will only be able to see the token once.
- Now that we have our token, we can use it when git prompts us for a password. If you are on Windows, you won't receive a password prompt but instead you will receive a pop-up that asks for you Personal Access Token. Because we previously configured our password/secret manager, our input will be saved for us. This way, we don't need to keep track of our PAT.
If you have trouble with this setup or a preference for SSH you can follow this guide