Installing Git on Windows
Git is a software used for version/source control, it allows you to keep track of any and all changes done while working on your project. By saving changes with gityou can roll back to earlier versions or have completely alternative branches of the project. Branches are commonly used to work on specific parts of the project without tampering with already working code. This is immensely useful when working with others.
Git is a very popular version control system and installing it is pretty straight forward. Let’s head to the git website and download it.
About halfway down the page you’ll find this section:
The website should detect your operating system and make a download link to the correct one. Clicking that should lead you to a new page and start the download. Once completed open the program, you might be prompted to allow it to run depending on your systems security settings.
After accepting the terms and pressing next you will be presented with a few options, such as selecting your favorite text editor for use with git.
These things largely comes down to preference and you can press next, however as a beginner today, I would highly suggest changing the name of the initial branch on new repositories* and set it to be ‘main’.
*A repository is where all the changes stored through git is held. GitHub is a widely used one.
In 2020 GitHub replaced the default initial name for their new repositories from ‘master’ to ‘main’.
This means that for those who are new to git and choose to not override the default name, if not careful, might end up getting errors due to a mismatch between name used on your computer and online. So if following tutorials for how to use git you will have to keep in mind that the names have to match for things to go smoothly.
When it has completed installing you can open your command prompt by writing ‘cmd’ in your start menu, and typing in “git --version”, a successful install will print out the version of git 😁
Now that you’re up and running, it’s time to get developing that great idea of yours. Thank you for your time and attention — there’s plenty more to come!
