How To Install Git on Debian 9 Stretch

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Git on Debian 9 Stretch. For those of you who didn’t know, Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system. Git 2.18.2 comes with a large number of updates versus the previous release 2.15. It is designed to handle small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Git on a Debian 9 (Stretch) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 9 (Stretch).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Git on Debian 9 Stretch

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt-get commands in the terminal:

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade

Step 2. Installing Git on Debian 9 Stretch.

• Method 1. Install Git on Debian from the repository.

sudo apt install git

To verify the installation type the following command:

[root@idroot.us ~]# git --version
git version 2.15.1

• Method 2. Install Git on Debian from Source Code

First, install all prerequisites:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install make libssl-dev libghc-zlib-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev gettext unzip
sudo wget https://github.com/git/git/archive/v2.18.0.tar.gz -O git.tar.gz
sudo tar -xf git.tar.gz
cd git-*

Next, compile the previously downloaded git source code and install git binaries:

sudo make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

Once the installation is completed verify it by typing the following command:

[root@idroot.us ~]# git --version git

version 2.18.0

Now that you have Git installed it is recommended to set your Git to commit email and username:

git config --global user.name "idroot"
git config --global user.email "youremail@yourdomain.com"

You can verify the changes with the following command:

[root@idroot.us ~]# git config --list

user.name=idroot
user.email=youremail@yourdomain.com

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Git. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Git on Debian 9 Stretch system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Git website.