How To Install Git on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Git on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Git is a distributed version control system. Git is free software designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. It can be easy to learn and used for tracking changes in source code during software development. Git has the features of data integrity, non-linear workflows, and fast performance. Git 2.25.1 comes with a large number of updates versus the previous release 2.20. 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 through the step-by-step installation Git on a Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) server. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• 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 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing Git on Ubuntu 20.04.

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

sudo apt install git

Confirm Git the installation:

[root@idroot.us ~]# git --version
git version 2.25.1

• Method 2. Installing Git from the Source.

First, install the dependencies necessary to build Git on your Ubuntu system:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install dh-autoreconf libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev make gettext libz-dev libssl-dev libghc-zlib-dev

Then, open your browser, visit the Git project’s mirror on GitHub and copy the latest release link URL that ends in .tar.gz

wget -c https://github.com/git/git/archive/v2.26.2.tar.gz -O - | sudo tar -xz -C /usr/src

Run the following commands to compile and install Git:

cd /usr/src/git-*
sudo make prefix=/usr/local all
sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

To check the current version installed of Git use the following command:

[root@idroot.us ~]# git --version
git version 2.26.2

Step 3. Configure Git.

Once successfully installed, we recommended setting your Git to commit email and username. To do that run the following commands:

git config --global user.name "Your-Name"
git config --global user.email "youremail@your-domain.com"

Then, verify the changes with the following command:

git config --list

To make other changes to your Git configuration you can either use the git config command or edit the ~/.gitconfig file with your favorite text editor.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Git. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Git in Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) systems. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Git website.