Question

I’d like to be able to do some development work on public/borrowed computers (where I have no root privileges) and I’ve managed to get most of my tools working off of a USB stick but I still haven’t found a Git solution.

The portable versions of Git that I have found are Windows-only. Do you know of any Mac alternatives?

EDIT: I’ve gotten a few suggestions to just copy my current installation of git from /usr/bin and put that on a USB drive. That’s a great idea but I don’t have a current installation of git to copy from. I won’t have my own computer back for a couple of weeks.

Would you happen to know where I could grab a pre-compiled version of git for OSX? I don’t have access to homebrew or… anything really. Ideally I could just grab a zip file from somewhere and dump it on my USB stick.

Answer 1

I’ve managed to put together a solution based on ideas from several different people (thanks to all of you):

• Download the Git binary for Mac OSX from git-scm.com. The downloaded DMG contains a PKG file.
• Unpack the PKG file with unpkg or something similar. (This step is necessary because normally PKG files can only be installed with root privileges.)
• Drop the etc and git folders that were just unpacked onto your USB stick.

Now, whenever you plug in your USB stick, just make sure to put the location of the git directory on your PATH (like this: export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/git/on/usb/stick) and you’ll be good to go!

NOTE: I’ve tested many of the git commands using this method and most seem to work without any issues. However, git init will complain like this: warning: templates not found /usr/local/git/share/git-core/templates. Not surprising since the templates are actually on your USB stick and not /usr/local. Despite this warning my repos seem to be working just fine.