Git is a free and open-source distributed version control system. It is designed to handle small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.

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This article will help you to install the latest Git client on Fedora Linux systems.

Method 1. Installing Git using DNF

The default Fedora repositories also contain the Git packages. But it contains an older version. You can use the following command to install the available git client on the Fedora system.

sudo dnf install git 

Method 2. Installing Latest Git from Source

  1. Firstly we need to make sure that we have installed the required packages on your system. Use the following command to install all the required packages for source code compilation.
    sudo dnf install curl-devel expat-devel gettext-devel openssl-devel zlib-devel gcc perl-ExtUtils-MakeMaker 
    
  2. Now remove any prior installation of Git through RPM file or Yum package manager. If your older version is also compiled through source, then skip this step.
    yum remove git 
    
  3. Download git source code from kernel git or simply use following command to download Git 2.0.5.
    cd /usr/src 
    wget https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-2.36.1.tar.gz 
    tar xzf git-2.36.1.tar.gz 
    
  4. After downloading and extracting the Git source code, Use the following command to compile the source code.
    cd git-2.36.1 
    sudo make prefix=/usr/local/git all 
    sudo make prefix=/usr/local/git install 
    
  5. Now, configure the PATH environment variable.
    echo "PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/git/bin" | sudo tee -a /etc/environment 
    source /etc/environment 
    
  6. Once completing the above steps, you have successfully installed Git in your system. Let’s use the following command to check the git version
    git --version 
    
    git version 2.36.1
    

Conclusion

This tutorial helped you to install the latest Git client on the Fedora Linux system.

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15 Comments

  1. This has worked fine.

    But does it changes the bash_profile in user’s home directory ?
    what does command “source /etc/bashrc” exactly does. ?

    Also, in case if we need to revert the installed git, then what the procedure for it ?.

  2. Thanks man, this really helped me on CentOS 6.9. I was struggling to update it from 1.7.1 to some newer version, and this article helps me to do it in few minutes!

  3. Hi,

    I was looking for a way how to bring latest Git to REHL 6 and there’s another, much easier way. Use Rackspace’s IUS repositories, they have rpms for latest Git version.

    Regards,
    P.

  4. I did the installation, everything went successfully. But now when I do git –version, it shows version 1.7.1 instead of version 2.0.5

  5. I am getting below error… Can you help out.. I am trying this on RHEL7

    [root@CTSC00541480801 git-2.5.0]# make prefix=/opt/git all
    CC credential-store.o
    In file included from credential-store.c:1:0:
    cache.h:21:18: fatal error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
    #include
    ^
    compilation terminated.
    make: *** [credential-store.o] Error 1
    [root@CTSC00541480801 git-2.5.0]

    • Not having the zlib.h file most likely means that you didn’t install the zlib-devel package. Try doing that yum install zlib-devel step again.

  6. This worked well, thanks!

    Had to ensure I exported the Git path though. In .bash_profile or other startup dotfile:

    export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/git/bin

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