Installation

At a minimum, you need the git system and command line tools. Installation instructions are available here

Other useful things that can make your git-life easier:

• Github Client - Github has it’s own client. Useful if you are just using github. Available for Windows and Mac
• Fugitive - Really excellent git wrapper for vim
• Tower - People seem to like Tower as a client. It does cost money and is Mac only, so your milage may vary
• EGit - If you want to manage git through Eclipse

Resources

• TryGit - A neat in-browser intro to using git and Github. No need to install/configure anything
• Cheat Sheet - Cheet sheet for common commands. Invaluable for getting familiar with git commands.
• Pro Git - Has everything you will ever need to know about git.

Common configuration

.gitconfig

The following .gitconfig is a good starting point. To use, download it, replace <your email> and <your name> with what they say, and place in your home directory. It defines some useful aliases and sets up some sensible defaults. Of particular note is [push] default = simple. For reasons why this is important, see this stack overflow answer.

.gitignore

You will quite often not want git to track everything in your git repo. The .gitignore file can be used to ignore specific files, paths, or wildcard patterns. Any files that match patterns in this file will be completely ignored by git. This is an example that probably does more than you need it to:

.bashrc

Setting up your terminal to display information about git when you are in a repo is magical. Add the following to your .bashrc to get a prompt that tells you what branch you are on and if there are un-commited changes.

Integrations

Read the Docs

Once your repo is connected to Read the Docs, you can just put .md files in a docs/ folder at the root of your repo. When you push changes to github, Read the Docs pulls them in and updates the documentation automagically.

Presentation

Intro to git presentation