Installing Git for Windows or Mac

The following instructions are for installing Git for Windows or Git for Mac client software.

If you are installing Git into a Linux distro (including the Windows subsystem for Linux) then use the standard module install commands for the distribution. For example, the commands for Ubuntu would be sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install git.

Download & Install the Git software

• Download & Install Git for Windows or Git for Mac

  • In the installation wizard take the default options but ensure that the following selections are made:

    1. Select Ensure the following options are selected

    

    1. Ensure Use Git for the Windows command Prompt is selected

    

    1. Ensure Enable Git Credential Manager is selected

    

Verify the Installation

• Verify that Git is correctly installed by opening a CMD or PowerShell window & entering the command git --version

  If you don’t see any errors Git is correctly installed.

Configure Git

• Open a CMD or PowerShell new window and run the following commands (substituting your details as required):

git config --global user.email "youralias@microsoft.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global credential.helper manager

Visual Studio Code, Windows Subsystem for Linux and .gitattributes

One irritation for those of us that live within the Windows Subsystem for Linux is that the SCM within vscode uses the Windows installation of Git, whilst the terminal sessions we use have Git installed in our prefererd distribution. And they can get out of sync, which can get a little messy, particularly when there are multiple contributors to a repo. All very unneccessary.

A recommendation is to create a .gitattributes in the root of your repo:

* text=auto eol=lf

This will force all files to have linux style line endings, but has the bonus side effect of keeping the Windows and Linux sides in sync.

If you are doing so on an existing repo then you may have to run the git cli commands to add and commit files to get everything synced initially, and then it should stay that way.