How to install the most current stable version of Git on Ubuntu

The easiest way to install the version control system Git on Ubuntu is of course to do apt-get install git-core. But that will not give you the most current stable version of Git.

Usually, that wouldn’t matter to me. I prefer the stability of Ubuntu’s official repositories, instead of having the latest version of every software. But with Git it is different.

In previous versions of Ubuntu, the repository have had very old version of Git. That has improved with Ubuntu 10.04, but I guess it will fall behind again. So therefore, I have previously compiled Git from source. But there is actually a better way to do that.

Ubuntu’s Git maintainers has a PPA with the most current stable version of Git for Ubuntu. So therefore it is just a matter of adding this repository to /etc/apt/sources.list and install Git:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:git-core/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get git-core git-doc gitk

This will install Git with all documentation and the Tcl/Tk revision tree visualizer. Other packages that you might want to consider to install are:

• git-gui — graphical user interface
• gitweb — web interface for browsing git repositories
• git-daemon-run — runit service for permanently running git-daemon, which is included in git-core
• git-email — git-send-email program for sending series of patch emails
• git-svn — tools for interoperating with Subversion repositories, and importing SVN development history
• git-cvs — tools for interoperating with CVS repositories, importing CVS development history, and providing CVS client access to git repositories
• git-arch — tools for importing development history from arch repositories