Install Git HTML help

This guide will help you install the local git HTML help files and set git to use them by default instead of the man pages.

Most git installations will install man files for help, but not the HTML help files (the same files seen on git's online documentation). Installing these help files is a fairly simple process.

Windows

Msysgit installs and sets the HTML help files as the default automatically. You don’t need to do anything!

OSX

To install web docs we simply need to clone the git-htmldocs repo to the correct path. Your documentation path may be different, pay attention to the output of git help --web commit for where your git is set to look for the HTML files.

$ git help --web commit
fatal: '/usr/local/git/share/doc/git-doc': not a documentation directory.

$ sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/git/share/doc
$ cd /usr/local/git/share/doc
$ sudo git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/git/git-htmldocs.git git-doc

To verify that the web docs now work, run git help --web commit. If your browser launches then you’re good to go. You can now set git to default to the web docs by running git config --global help.format web

Updating the docs

Updating is a simple matter of pulling:

$ cd /usr/local/git/share/doc
$ sudo git pull