Installation Guide

git-bug is distributed as a single binary, and is available for multiple platforms. Follow this document for instructions on how to install git-bug, and verify your installation.

Download a pre-compiled release binary
Linux
- Arch Linux
- Nixpkgs
FreeBSD
MacOS
Windows
Build from source
Verify your installation

Download a pre-compiled release binary

You can download the latest release binary from the release page, making sure to grab the appropriate binary for your system.

Next, rename the binary to git-bug, or git-bug.exe if you're using Windows.

Finally, place the binary in a directory that's in your PATH. That's it! You should now have git-bug available as a command line tool.

Linux

git-bug is available on a variety of Linux distributions, but how you install it depends on your distribution and package manager(s), as there is no standard package manager common to all distributions.

Arch Linux

git-bug is available in the Arch Linux User Repository (AUR).

Below, you'll find a non-exhaustive list of commands that use common third party tools for installing packages from the AUR.

Using pacman

pacman -S git-bug

Nixpkgs

git-bug is available via nixpkgs.

Using home-manager

home.package = with pkgs; [
  git-bug
];

Using system configuration

environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [
  git-bug
];

Temporary installation with nix shell (flake)

nix shell nixpkgs#git-bug

Temporary installation with nix-shell (stable)

nix-shell -p git-bug

FreeBSD

git-bug is available on FreeBSD through a few different methods.

Using pkg

pkg install git-bug

Using the ports collection

make -C /usr/ports/devel/git-bug install clean

MacOS

git-bug is shipped via Homebrew:

brew install git-bug

Windows

git-bug is shipped via scoop:

scoop install git-bug

Build from source

You can also build git-bug from source, if you wish. You'll need the following dependencies:

git
nix

[!NOTE] The commands below assume you do not want to keep the repository on disk, and thus clones the repository to a new temporary directory and performs a lightweight clone in order to reduce network latency and data transfer.

As a result, the repository cloned during these steps will not contain the full history. If that is important to you, clone the repository using the method you prefer.

First, create a new repository on disk:

cd $(mktemp -d) && git init .

Next, set the remote to the upstream source:

git remote add origin git@github.com:git-bug/git-bug.git

Next, choose whether you want to build from a release tag, branch, or development head and expand the instructions below.

Build from a release tag

First, list all of the tags from the repository (we use sed in the command below to filter out some unnecessary visual noise):

git ls-remote origin refs/tags/\* | sed -e 's/refs\/tags\///'

You'll see output similar to:

c1a08111b603403d4ee0a78c1214f322fecaa3ca        0.1.0
d959acc29dcbc467790ae87389f9569bb830c8c6        0.2.0
ad59f77fd425b00ae4b8d7360a64dc3dc1c73bd0        0.3.0
...

Tip
The tags are in the right-most column. Old revisions up to and including 0.7.1 do not contain a v prefix, however, all revisions after, do.

Select the tag you wish to build, and fetch it using the command below. Be sure to replace REPLACE-ME with the tag you selected:

git fetch --no-tags --depth 1 origin +refs/tags/REPLACE-ME:refs/tags/REPLACE-ME

NOTE
The --no-tags flag might seem out of place, since we are fetching a tag, but it isn't -- the reason we use this is avoid fetching other tags, in case you have fetch.pruneTags enabled in your global configuration, which causes git to fetch all tags.

Next, check out the tag, replacing REPLACE-ME with the tag you selected:

git checkout REPLACE-ME

Finally, run the build target from //:Makefile:

make build

This will build git-bug and place it at ./result/bin/git-bug. Move this binary file to a location in your PATH.

Build the unstable development HEAD

First, fetch the most recent commit for the default branch:

git fetch --no-tags --depth 1 origin HEAD:refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

Next, check out the tree you pulled:

git checkout origin/HEAD