Install Git on CentOS 5

Git is an open source, distributed version control system. It’s all the rage right now with sites like GitHub offering a social coding experience, and popular projects such as Perl, Ruby on Rails, and the Linux kernel using it.

In addition to it being easy to use, it’s also a cinch to install. Let’s start by logging into your server via SSH. Make sure you log in as root or another user with sudo access. First, we need to install a few dependencies Git needs. We can do this easily using yum:

yum -y install zlib-devel openssl-devel cpio expat-devel gettext-devel


Next, we’ll change directories to /usr/local/src, download the latest Git source code and untar it, and then change into our newly created directory:

cd /usr/local/src
wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.9.tar.gz
tar xvzf git-1.7.9.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.9


We’re almost there! Now we need to configure a makefile for our system, compile the code and install it. It sounds daunting, but it’s quite simple:

./configure
make
make install


And last, but not least, let’s check to make sure our installation is a success. Change to your home directory, create a new directory, and initialize it as a Git repository:

cd
mkdir git-test
cd git-test
git init


If all goes well, you should see similar output:

Initialized empty Git repository in /root/git-test/.git/


That’s it! If you’re new to Git, there are several sites to help you get started, including Git Ready and GitHub Guides.