Git installation Normally you can just do "make" followed by "make install", and that will install the git programs in your own ~/bin/ directory. If you want to do a global install, you can do $ make prefix=/usr all doc info ;# as yourself # make prefix=/usr install install-doc install-html install-info ;# as root (or prefix=/usr/local, of course). Just like any program suite that uses $prefix, the built results have some paths encoded, which are derived from $prefix, so "make all; make prefix=/usr install" would not work. The beginning of the Makefile documents many variables that affect the way git is built. You can override them either from the command line, or in a config.mak file. Alternatively you can use autoconf generated ./configure script to set up install paths (via config.mak.autogen), so you can write instead $ make configure ;# as yourself $ ./configure --prefix=/usr ;# as yourself $ make all doc ;# as yourself # make install install-doc install-html;# as root If you're willing to trade off (much) longer build time for a later faster git you can also do a profile feedback build with $ make prefix=/usr profile # make prefix=/usr PROFILE=BUILD install This will run the complete test suite as training workload and then rebuild git with the generated profile feedback. This results in a git which is a few percent faster on CPU intensive workloads. This may be a good tradeoff for distribution packagers. Alternatively you can run profile feedback only with the git benchmark suite. This runs significantly faster than the full test suite, but has less coverage: $ make prefix=/usr profile-fast # make prefix=/usr PROFILE=BUILD install Or if you just want to install a profile-optimized version of git into your home directory, you could run: $ make profile-install or $ make profile-fast-install As a caveat: a profile-optimized build takes a *lot* longer since the git tree must be built twice, and in order for the profiling measurements to work properly, ccache must be disabled and the test suite has to be run using only a single CPU. In addition, the profile feedback build stage currently generates a lot of additional compiler warnings. Issues of note: - Ancient versions of GNU Interactive Tools (pre-4.9.2) installed a program "git", whose name conflicts with this program. But with version 4.9.2, after long hiatus without active maintenance (since around 1997), it changed its name to gnuit and the name conflict is no longer a problem. NOTE: When compiled with backward compatibility option, the GNU Interactive Tools package still can install "git", but you can build it with --disable-transition option to avoid this. - You can use git after building but without installing if you want to test drive it. Simply run git found in bin-wrappers directory in the build directory, or prepend that directory to your $PATH. This however is less efficient than running an installed git, as you always need an extra fork+exec to run any git subcommand. It is still possible to use git without installing by setting a few environment variables, which was the way this was done traditionally. But using git found in bin-wrappers directory in the build directory is far simpler. As a historical reference, the old way went like this: GIT_EXEC_PATH=`pwd` PATH=`pwd`:$PATH GITPERLLIB=`pwd`/perl/build/lib export GIT_EXEC_PATH PATH GITPERLLIB - By default (unless NO_PERL is provided) Git will ship various perl scripts. However, for simplicity it doesn't use the ExtUtils::MakeMaker toolchain to decide where to place the perl libraries. Depending on the system this can result in the perl libraries not being where you'd like them if they're expected to be used by things other than Git itself. Manually supplying a perllibdir prefix should fix this, if this is a problem you care about, e.g.: prefix=/usr perllibdir=/usr/$(/usr/bin/perl -MConfig -wle 'print substr $Config{installsitelib}, 1 + length $Config{siteprefixexp}') Will result in e.g. perllibdir=/usr/share/perl/5.26.1 on Debian, perllibdir=/usr/share/perl5 (which we'd use by default) on CentOS. - Unless NO_PERL is provided Git will ship various perl libraries it needs. Distributors of Git will usually want to set NO_PERL_CPAN_FALLBACKS if NO_PERL is not provided to use their own copies of the CPAN modules Git needs. - Git is reasonably self-sufficient, but does depend on a few external programs and libraries. Git can be used without most of them by adding the appropriate "NO_=YesPlease" to the make command line or config.mak file. - "zlib", the compression library. Git won't build without it. - "ssh" is used to push and pull over the net. - A POSIX-compliant shell is required to run some scripts needed for everyday use (e.g. "bisect", "request-pull"). - "Perl" version 5.8.1 or later is needed to use some of the features (e.g. sending patches using "git send-email", interacting with svn repositories with "git svn"). If you can live without these, use NO_PERL. Note that recent releases of Redhat/Fedora are reported to ship Perl binary package with some core modules stripped away (see https://lwn.net/Articles/477234/), so you might need to install additional packages other than Perl itself, e.g. Digest::MD5, File::Spec, File::Temp, Net::Domain, Net::SMTP, and Time::HiRes. - git-imap-send needs the OpenSSL library to talk IMAP over SSL if you are using libcurl older than 7.34.0. Otherwise you can use NO_OPENSSL without losing git-imap-send. - "libcurl" library is used for fetching and pushing repositories over http:// or https://, as well as by git-imap-send if the curl version is >= 7.34.0. If you do not need that functionality, use NO_CURL to build without it. Git requires version "7.19.5" or later of "libcurl" to build without NO_CURL. This version requirement may be bumped in the future. - "expat" library; git-http-push uses it for remote lock management over DAV. Similar to "curl" above, this is optional (with NO_EXPAT). - "wish", the Tcl/Tk windowing shell is used in gitk to show the history graphically, and in git-gui. If you don't want gitk or git-gui, you can use NO_TCLTK. - A gettext library is used by default for localizing Git. The primary target is GNU libintl, but the Solaris gettext implementation also works. We need a gettext.h on the system for C code, gettext.sh (or Solaris gettext(1)) for shell scripts, and libintl-perl for Perl programs. Set NO_GETTEXT to disable localization support and make Git only use English. Under autoconf the configure script will do this automatically if it can't find libintl on the system. - Python version 2.7 or later is needed to use the git-p4 interface to Perforce. - Some platform specific issues are dealt with Makefile rules, but depending on your specific installation, you may not have all the libraries/tools needed, or you may have necessary libraries at unusual locations. Please look at the top of the Makefile to see what can be adjusted for your needs. You can place local settings in config.mak and the Makefile will include them. Note that config.mak is not distributed; the name is reserved for local settings. - To build and install documentation suite, you need to have the asciidoc/xmlto toolchain. Because not many people are inclined to install the tools, the default build target ("make all") does _not_ build them. "make doc" builds documentation in man and html formats; there are also "make man", "make html" and "make info". Note that "make html" requires asciidoc, but not xmlto. "make man" (and thus make doc) requires both. "make install-doc" installs documentation in man format only; there are also "make install-man", "make install-html" and "make install-info". Building and installing the info file additionally requires makeinfo and docbook2X. Version 0.8.3 is known to work. Building and installing the pdf file additionally requires dblatex. Version >= 0.2.7 is known to work. All formats require at least asciidoc 8.4.1. Alternatively, you can use Asciidoctor (requires Ruby) by passing USE_ASCIIDOCTOR=YesPlease to make. You need at least Asciidoctor version 1.5. There are also "make quick-install-doc", "make quick-install-man" and "make quick-install-html" which install preformatted man pages and html documentation. To use these build targets, you need to clone two separate git-htmldocs and git-manpages repositories next to the clone of git itself. The minimum supported version of docbook-xsl is 1.74. Users attempting to build the documentation on Cygwin may need to ensure that the /etc/xml/catalog file looks something like this: This can be achieved with the following two xmlcatalog commands: xmlcatalog --noout \ --add rewriteURI \ http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current \ /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xsl-stylesheets \ /etc/xml/catalog xmlcatalog --noout \ --add rewriteURI \ http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/xsl/current \ /usr/share/sgml/docbook/xml-dtd-4.5 \ /etc/xml/catalog