Git from src on Debian

Most linux distros have git packages available, but many are not the latest version. Due to this, and the fact the ones on Debian are often quite far behind, I like to build git from src. You can use the following steps to do this. We'll need some build dependencies so we'll also update our packages first.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install gettext libcurl4-gnutls-dev libexpat1-dev libghc-zlib-dev libssl-dev make

Now that we have our build dependecies installed, let's go ahead and grab the git tarball from the tags page. At the time of publishing this post, the stable version was 2.50.1. The easiest way to grab this is with curl:

cd /tmp
curl -OL https://github.com/git/git/archive/refs/tags/v2.50.1.tar.gz

Now unpack the tarball

tar zxvf v2.50.1.tar.gz

Now we can build git (this will likely take a few minutes!)

cd git-2.50.1
make prefix=/usr/local all

Once the make process has completed, we can go ahead and install it

sudo make prefix=/usr/local install

Once installed, you can test the version to confirm everything went according to plan

git --version

git version 2.50.1

Congratulations! You have now successfully built git from source.

To clean up, you can also remove the source files

rm -rf /tmp/git-*
rm /tmp/v2.50.1.tar.gz