git Install and Config

I’ve been going through the curriculum of The Odin Project to learn more about web development, so another one of the first tools I installed was git. Git is a version control system and is an essential tool for any type of development work. With MacPorts, installing git was was easy.

MacPorts homepage

MacPorts Available Ports page

MacPorts git page

To install git using MacPorts, I needed to switch to my admin account using the ‘substitute user’ or ‘su’ command.

Switched to admin account / Ran install command

There were quite a few dependencies for git…50 of them!

Install output

To confirm git installed successfully, I quit my current terminal session and then checked the version in a new terminal.

git version 2.34.1 installed

Next I configured my local git profile per the recommendations of The Odin Project curriculum.

[embed]Setting Up Git | The Odin Project Git is a very popular version control system. You'll become very familiar with this piece of software throughout TOP…www.theodinproject.com

git configuration

To be able to push code to GitHub without entering my username and password every time, I needed to set up a new SSH key.

[embed]Checking for existing SSH keys - GitHub Docs Note: GitHub is improving security by dropping older, insecure key types. DSA keys ( ssh-dss) are no longer supported…docs.github.com

Checked for existing SSH key

Contents of my user directory

Created .ssh directory for my SSH keys

Since I knew that I will be creating additional SSH keys in the future for different purposes, I changed the output file name from the default with the -f flag.

[embed]Generating a new SSH key and adding it to the ssh-agent - GitHub Docs If you don't already have an SSH key, you must generate a new SSH key to use for authentication. If you're unsure…docs.github.com

Ran ssh-keygen command

Output of ssh-keygen command / Confirm keys are in .ssh directory

Started ssh-agent

Checked if config file already exists

Created and updated config file

Added key to ssh-agent and added passphrase to keychain

ssh-add confirmation

Now that my SSH key was created and added to the ssh-agent, it was time to add the key to my GitHub account.

[embed]Adding a new SSH key to your GitHub account - GitHub Docs Before adding a new SSH key to your account on GitHub.com, you should have: After adding a new SSH key to your account…docs.github.com

Copied contents of public key file

My GitHub profile settings

SSH and GPG keys page of my account settings

Pasted public key

Password required to add new ssh key

SSH and GPG keys page with new ssh key

With my SSH key added to my Github profile, I could now test my SSH connection.

[embed]Testing your SSH connection - GitHub Docs Before testing your SSH connection, you should have: When you test your connection, you'll need to authenticate this…docs.github.com

ssh command

Confirmed ED25519 fingerprint before connecting

Successfully connected to GitHub via SSH

GitHub added to my known_hosts file

Now that I had git installed and my SSH key was added to GitHub, I could pick up where I had left off with The Odin Project curriculum.

What version control system do you use? With git being the most popular version control system, is it worth it to learn how to use a different one? Let me know by responding to this post, or you can email me at cypherbean@protonmail.com.