How do you install hub (git wrapper) on Ubuntu with autocomplete and man documentation working?

Question

According to the official docs you just download a pre-compiled binary but this would leave things like man documentation and autocompletion not working.

Answer 1

You can use this PPA to install hub as a package:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cpick/hub
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install hub

Answer 2

Updated answer

As PatKilg pointed out in the comment, the Hub maintainers now discourage using the snap.

Original answer

Hub is available as a snap now. https://snapcraft.io/hub

You can install it with sudo snap install --classic hub.

Answer 3

Install Hub

1. Download Hub from Github

   https://github.com/github/hub/releases

2. Extract it. I've extracted it to Apps/ directory in my home and renamed it to hub-linux. So, in my setup, the complete path to the bin folder is /home/anwar/Apps/hub-linux/bin

3. Now open the ~/.bashrc file and add the hub binary path to the $PATH environment variable. Adding a line like below will work.

    ### Adds Hub-linux
    export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/Apps/hub-linux/bin/"

Don't forget to to use actual path in your setup

Add the Bash Completion

To add bash completion, we need to tell bash to source the completion file came with hub-archive. The completion file is in the etc folder of the extracted hub folder. To do so,

Open the .bashrc and write there these lines

### Load Hub Linux bash completion
if [ -f $HOME/Apps/hub-linux/etc/hub.bash_completion.sh ] ; then
     . $HOME/Apps/hub-linux/etc/hub.bash_completion.sh
fi

Don't forget to replace the exact path of hub.bash_completion.sh file according to your setup

Now, You should be able to use hub bash completion

Add Hub's manpage to man database

Hub's man page actually came with the archive. It's in the share folder. To add the manpage, we need to put it in the man page directory.

To do so, Open a terminal and cd to the extracted hub archive. Assuming your current directory is in the same directory where hub's bin, share, README.md reside, use this command to copy the manpage

sudo cp -r share/ /usr/
sudo chmod 644 /usr/share/man/man1/hub.1

Now you can use hub's manual page using man hub command.

If you can't immediately use man hub, use sudo updatedb to refresh man db of the system.

Answer 4

This script should do the job on Ubuntu 16.04 with zsh.

# Install binary and documentation
wget https://github.com/github/hub/releases/download/v2.2.9/hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9.tgz
tar zvxvf hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9.tgz
sudo ./hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9/install

# Setup autocomplete for zsh:
mkdir -p ~/.zsh/completions
mv ./hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9/etc/hub.zsh_completion ~/.zsh/completions/_hub
echo "fpath=(~/.zsh/completions $fpath)" >> ~/.zshrc
echo "autoload -U compinit && compinit" >> ~/.zshrc

# add alias
echo "eval "$(hub alias -s)"" >> ~/.zshrc

# Cleanup
rm -rf hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9

Alternatively for Ubuntu 16.04 with bash:

# Install binary and documentation
wget https://github.com/github/hub/releases/download/v2.2.9/hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9.tgz
tar zvxvf hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9.tgz
sudo ./hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9/install

# Setup autocomplete for bash:
mkdir -p ~/.bash/completions
mv ./hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9/etc/hub.bash_completion.sh ~/.bash/completions/_hub
echo "if [ -f ~/.bash/completions/_hub ]; then" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "    . ~/.bash/completions/_hub" >> ~/.bashrc
echo "fi" >> ~/.bashrc

# add alias
echo "eval "$(hub alias -s)"" >> ~/.bashrc

# Cleanup
rm -rf hub-linux-amd64-2.2.9

Test installation:

hub version