git is essentially decentralized, which seems to be the direction everything is going, so I decided to take a shot at it.

I’ve used cvs, VSS, TFS, SVN and now git and I’ve got to say it is definitely pretty cool (and free).

The main difference I have noticed between git and these other guys is git allows you to make commits to your local machine and push them later. This means faster commits, more commits and therefore more versioning and finer details on revisions, and no need to worry about potential connectivity issues.

Behind the scenes git is also much cleaner on everything from its transmission protocols to its storage mechanism, so overall it is a more evolved product.

I haven’t fully explored all of its features yet, so I’ll keep revisiting this article to keep it updated from time to time.

First of all, you will have to decide upon a remote repository. You could setup your own, but that is currently out of scope of this article. In this scenario I chose projectlocker.

I left all projectlocker settings as default and using ssh as the communication protocol. http(s) is available as well, but ssh rocks :).

If you’re on Windows, download and install Cygwin and make sure you select OpenSSH. Cygwin will give you a nice little linux shell for us to do our work from. If you were hoping for a GUI, try this route first, you might be surprised at the simplicity of the command line.

Open cygwin to create a public key to authenticate to the remote server. Enter ssh-keygen and press enter. Keep pressing enter on all prompts and skip the password.

cd to the ~/.ssh folder where it likely created your key enter cat id_rsa.pub. This will dump the contents of your public key file. Right click on the command prompt title bar of the window and select mark then grab your dumped file and paste in your remote repo service. Make sure the username has no spaces and matches your pc name and is also listed in the file dump.

Save changes in remote service then go back to cygwin. To test you did the above step correctly do “ssh -v [your git without specifying port of \reponame.git]“. It shouldn’t connect fully, but should give you enough status to verify it’s working. If it prompts for password then it was unable to verify public key which the -v output should indicate.

Once the above is good, identify yourself with:
git config –global user.name “yourname”
git config –global user.email “youremail@yourdomain.com”

Then download the remote repository (which may or may not be empty, that’s ok).
git clone [yourauthpart@yourdomainpart:yourreponame.git]

To add in a project I already had in my local, I did the above steps first within C:\git then copied my project folder in C:\git\projectname. cd into git then use this command to add any files within:
git add [filename or wildcard * for all]
git commit -m “my first commit!”

Then to push up to repo at any point simply use:
git push origin master

And that’s it!

(Optional: If you get an error on push origin or skipped clone then first do):
git init
git remote add origin [yourauthpart@yourdomainpart:yourreponame.git]
git pull origin master

So to sum up the steps we have:
1) setup repo on remote service
2) install cygwin and openssh (skip this step on *nix)
3) ssh-keygen (enter on all prompts)
4) cat public key and enter in remote repo service
5) test key setup is correct using ssh
6) identify your user and email to git
7) clone the repo and begin adding, committing and pushing!

Rock and roll!

References
cforcoding.com (blog), http://www.cforcoding.com/2009/09/windows-git-tutorial-cygwin-ssh-and.html
git-svn crash course, http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html
bahrenbugs (blog), http://blog.bahrenburgs.com/2010/01/using-git-with-projectlocker-on-mac.html
projectlocker, http://projectlocker.com/
cygwin, http://www.cygwin.com/