Sections: Install these first // Install Git-it // Using Git-it // Tips

A few development essentials, all are free and/or free and open source.

• Git, this is your tracker of changes!
• If you're on a Mac, you can install Git automatically. To do this, open the Terminal application from spotlight and type git. This will prompt Git to install the rest of the command line tools for Git. This should only take a few minutes. It will ask if you would like to download Xcode, which you can ignore.
• Node.js, this is what this app is written in so you'll need this to run it. It's an engine for running JavaScript on servers (your computer is a server!) and will live quietly in the background.

Once you have the essentials above, install Git-it.

• Open up a terminal window and install Git-it globally on your computer (so that you can run it from anywhere). NPM (which is included when you download Node.js) delivers Node.js modules (that's what this app is) to your computer from the command line, real easy like:

$ npm install -g @lighthouse_labs/git-it

• If you run into trouble with this command it may be due to permissions on your computer, try adding 'sudo': sudo npm install -g @lighthouse_labs/git-it
• Once it's done installing components, you can run it:

$ git-it

• This should load the menu. You're ready to go! Select the first challenge, hit enter and you're on your way!

• Once you've run git-it and the menu has loaded, use the arrows ↑↓ to select the first challenge and press 'enter'.

• With the challenge loaded, follow the instructions on Compass.

• Read the instructions in Compass and use your terminal to complete the tasks.

• When you're done with a challenge, type git-it verify in terminal.

• If the challenge components were not completed correctly, Git-it returns some text to help you know what went wrong.

• Run git-it again to load the menu and select the next challenge!

Code snippets often times look like $ some code-stuff --here. The dollar sign identifies the line as one a user would enter into the command line, but you don't actually include it when you type it into terminal. In this case, you'd actually just type some code-stuff --here.

Variables are indicated by <VARIABLENAME> in code snippets. When you actually use the line of code, replace it, including the <>, with your variable. For instance to make a new folder in terminal the format is, mkdir <FOLDERNAME>, so if you wanted to make a folder named 'octocat', you'd type: mkdir octocat.

Command line, terminal, bash all basically mean the same thing: the MS-DOS, Doogie Howser looking screen full of words and numbers. It's awesomely powerful and allows you to control your computer with text commands.

You can do a lot of things from your terminal like delete, rename, copy or create files and folders; run scripts and send things back and forth between servers (like the ones storing things on GitHub.com) and your computer (also a server!).