About the Author

Chris Shiflett

Hi, I’m Chris, a web craftsman making things like Mapalong & Brooklyn Beta with my friends at Analog.

Git on Snow Leopard

I've had a GitHub account for months, but I've yet to use it. After I mentionined on Twitter that I might start using it, the response was very positive. People really love Git and GitHub both.

Unsurprisingly, my Mac didn't already have git. (It's not part of the developer tools either.) GitHub has a nice help page on installing it, including one specifically on compiling from source. I chose the latter.

GitHub's help page on compiling from source is thorough enough to make it seem complicated. To show just how simple it is, here's exactly what I did:

curl -O http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.5.2.tar.gz
tar -xvzf git-1.6.5.2.tar.gz 
cd git-1.6.5.2
make prefix=/usr/local
sudo make install prefix=/usr/local

GitHub provides very helpful instructions when you create a new project. For my new getFavicon project, the instructions were as follows:

mkdir getFavicon
cd getFavicon
git init
touch README
git add README
git commit -m 'first commit'
git remote add origin git@github.com:shiflett/getFavicon.git
git push origin master

If only discovering favicons were this easy! :-)

About this post

Git on Snow Leopard was posted on Mon, 02 Nov 2009 at 13:31:33 GMT. Follow me on Twitter.

7 comments

1.Bill Karwin said:

I used macports to install git.

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 at 15:31:36 GMT Link

2.Derek said:

Not sure why you would need to compile Git from source when there's already an official pkg available for easy download and install. (That being said, since I already have MacPorts installed, I went that route instead.)

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 at 18:09:20 GMT Link

3.Chris Shiflett said:

I didn't see any official packages for Snow Leopard, and I don't use MacPorts. This was pretty easy.

Hopefully using Git is just as easy. :-)

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 at 18:25:37 GMT Link

4.Derek said:

Chris, the official packages are available in the "Download" section of the official Git site: http://git-scm.com/. There's also an OpenInGitGui app although I still don't use Git as much as I should, so I haven't really used it yet.

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 at 08:36:04 GMT Link

5.Nate Abele said:

I also highly recommend GitX, which is a GUI client for OSX. It isn't full-featured by any means (you still have to push and pull from the command line), but I find it very useful for reviewing histories and staging commits. It's much more Mac-friendly than git-gui.

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 at 08:06:26 GMT Link

6.Niall Kelly said:

Having tried other methods without success and looked through plenty of bloated documentation, this just works! Thank you for providing simple code that does what it's supposed to...

Mon, 15 Mar 2010 at 14:42:15 GMT Link

7.Chris Shiflett said:

Glad it helped, Niall!

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 at 02:30:41 GMT Link

Hello! What’s your name?

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