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Git is a version control system like CVS and Subversion. It was created by Linus Torvalds and used for Linux. It has recently been adopted by the Ruby community and many of the new Ruby and Ruby on Rails projects now use it. One of the reason’s for it’s popularity amongst the Ruby community is because of github. In there own words:

GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease.

How to quickly setup Git on Apple OSX

The simplest way to install Git on Apple OSX (for Intel Mac) is to use this pre-packaged installer: http://metastatic.org/text/Concern/2007/08/18/git-package-for-mac-os-x/, however if you have a PowerPC Mac or wish to use an alternative installation method, try the information on this site: http://bc.tech.coop/blog/070827.html

Launch the installer, and accept the license agreements. Once the installer has completed open up OSX Terminal.app (cmd + space, then type terminal), and type git at the command prompt, if all has been successful you should see something like this:

usage: git [--version] [--exec-path[=GIT_EXEC_PATH]] [-p|--paginate|--no-pager] [--bare] [--git-dir=GIT_DIR] [--work-tree=GIT_WORK_TREE] [--help] COMMAND [ARGS]

The most commonly used git commands are:
   add           Add file contents to the index
   apply         Apply a patch on a git index file and a working tree
   archive       Create an archive of files from a named tree
   bisect        Find the change that introduced a bug by binary search
   branch        List, create, or delete branches
   checkout      Checkout and switch to a branch

...  continued with more commands ...

Configuring Git

One of the interesting things about Git is that it can be configured from the command line. Therefore the first thing to do is setup your user details so that when you add changes it uses your details. This web site has some very good instructions on how to get up and running using Git very quickly http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html.

To configure your Git user details enter the following at the command prompt:

git config --global user.name "Your Name Comes Here"
git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.example.com

Clone / Checkout the RSpec Git Repository

Now you should be able to clone (Subversion calls this checkout) a repository so that you can view the source code. To do this enter the following command at the command prompt. I intend to checkout the RSpec repository from github:

git clone git://github.com/dchelimsky/rspec.git

All being well you should see output in your Terminal like this:

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/myname/my_repositories/rspec/.git/
remote: Counting objects: 46810, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (10646/10646), done.)   
Indexing 46810 objects...
remote: Total 46810 (delta 33521), reused 46810 (delta 33521)
 100% (46810/46810) done
Resolving 33521 deltas...
 100% (33521/33521) done

Now you should have all the source code in your new repository.