Setup Git

To be able to clone, commit, push and pull Git repositories, you need to install and configure Git, which needs to have SSH authenticated setup to be able to connect with your account to the Git server.

Git

Install Git

For Fedora

sudo dnf install -y git

On Windows in admin powershell

winget install -e --id Git.Git

On MacOS

brew install git

For Ubuntu and derivatives

sudo apt update && sudo apt install git

That's it ! Package managers are easy right ?

Configure the global Git identity

You also need to indicate to Git which name and email you want to store in your commits. You can change those settings globally (notice the --global). You have to adapt to your name (the name on your GitHub account, or if you don't have one, just your username). I recommend the email you use it the noreply address provided by GitHub.

git config --global user.name "Samuel Roland"
git config --global user.email 47849646+samuelroland@users.noreply.github.com

You can find this noreply address in your Emails settings:

To make sure it works, you can check the global configuration file for Git. It should contains the 2 entries name and email.

> cat ~/.gitconfig
[user]
	email = 47849646+samuelroland@users.noreply.github.com
	name = Samuel Roland

SSH

Check if you have existing SSH pair

On Linux and MacOS, go checkout

cd ~/.ssh
ls

On Windows

cd %USERPROFILE%\.ssh
ls

If you have an existing pair you can skip the next section.

Generate a new SSH keypair

You have to generate a new SSH key pair with the command ssh-keygen -t ed25519. Leave the default path to store the key (here in /home/sam/.ssh/id_ed25519). You can define a passphrase or not, as you wish.

See example

> ssh-keygen -t ed25519
Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.
Enter file in which to save the key (/home/sam/.ssh/id_ed25519): 
Created directory '/home/sam/.ssh'.
Enter passphrase for "/home/sam/.ssh/id_ed25519" (empty for no passphrase): 
Enter same passphrase again: 
Your identification has been saved in /home/sam/.ssh/id_ed25519
Your public key has been saved in /home/sam/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:wxTNDsNImCcZ/mS3GHPTUx5pmCbMMi0UU4Utm8dBYCA sam@sxp
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
|    EB*X=Oooo.   |
|   .=.*o@oOoo.   |
|    .o=+=@oo.    |
|     + Ooo+.     |
|      o S.       |
|         .       |
|                 |
|                 |
|                 |
+----[SHA256]-----+

Add your SSH keys to the Git server

When you'll do git push, the Git server needs to know who is the connected user. You can inform the server to link your account with a public key.

You can display the public key with cat (choose the file ending with .pub)

cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

and copy the full content and go create a new SSH key in your settings for your Git server.

On GitHub: https://github.com/settings/keys
On GitLab: https://gitlab.com/-/user_settings/ssh_keys
On Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/user/settings/keys

Verify SSH connection

Once that's done, you can verify the connection is working with the following command.

> ssh -T git@github.com
Hi samuelroland! You've successfully authenticated, but GitHub does not provide shell access.

You should then see your pseudo and this kind of message. Before this you may see the verification of the public key's fingerprint. You can go on this page of the GitHub docs about GitHub's SSH key fingerprints to verify it does matches to one of the entries.

To easily compare the long strings, I recommend you to copy the string from your terminal, and paste that in your browser in the ctrl+f search bar. It there is match, it will be highlighted and you didn't needed to compare a dozens chars by hand...