Title: Getting started with Git

This document is a primer on using Git for an Apache Software Foundation project.

Contents

  • Repositories
  • Repository checkout
  • Committers: getting started
  • Windows users
  • Line endings
  • Troubleshooting
  • Further reading

This page is about Apache read/write repositories hosted at http://gitbox.com/apache/.

Access a repository through GitHub. If you have concerns about GitHub‘s terms and conditions, use Apache’s GitBox, which also gives full access to Apache's writable Git repositories.

The repository URLs are all of the form:

https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git

Cloning a repository

  • Committers: $ git clone https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git
  • Non-Committers: $ git clone http://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git

Set up your name and email that Git will use when you make commits:

$ git config --global user.name "My Name Here"
$ git config --global user.email myusername@apache.org

If you're a long-time Git user you can set these configuration variables on a per-repository basis:

$ git config user.name "My Name Here"
$ git config user.email myusername@apache.org

You can also add your apache.org email address to your GitHub account so that the Apache mirrors on GitHub link to your Gravatar and user accounts.

To push to a repository you need to authenticate. More recent versions of Git prompt for a user name and password, and in some cases will cache the credentials in your operating system's default credential store.

On Mac OS X, you need to have git-credential-osxkeychain installed, and to set the following configuration:

$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

If you do not see an authentication prompt, you need to set up a ~/.netrc file that contains your user credentials:

$ (umask 0277; cat >> ~/.netrc <<EOF)
machine gitbox.apache.org
login username
password mypassword
EOF
chmod 0600 ~/.netrc

You can list your user name in the Git repository URL, but this requires that you provide your password for every fetch and push. You can simplify this step by cloning a URL like:

$ git clone https://username@gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git

While it's possible to list your password in the URL, we discourage this practice as it leaves your password in plain text in the shell history.

You can use git-gui as part of the msysgit package.

Instead of setting up a ~/.netrc file you need to:

  1. Set up a %HOME% environment pointing to C:\Users\yourloginname\
  2. Create a _netrc file in %HOME%_netrc with this text all on one line: machine gitbox.apache.org login username password mypassword

In general, you should normalize line endings in the Git repository and set them to be platform specific on checkout.

  • The msysgit installer on Windows will prompt you to set the core.autocrlf setting to true by default.
  • On Mac OS X or Linux, use this setting: $ git config --global core.autocrlf input

Further details and attributes for handling line endings differently per file type are available at Configuring Git to handle line endings.

no DAV locking

If you get an error like this:

error: no DAV locking support on http://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git/
fatal: git-http-push failed

It means that you're trying to push over HTTP, which is disabled. To fix this error change the remote repository URL to use HTTPS. You can edit the .git/config file to update the URL variable, or use:

$ git config remote.origin.url https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf/reponame.git