How to Install GitKraken Desktop

There are three steps to success with GitKraken Desktop. That’s it!

  1. Download GitKraken Desktop
  2. Install GitKraken Desktop
  3. Use GitKraken Desktop

No Git tools are required for GitKraken Desktop, so once you’ve run the installer, you can open the app and get going.

If you want to utilize additional features such as the terminal or LFS, download git-scm .

Below are platform-specific instructions and details on minimum requirements.

Looking for GitKraken On-Premise Self-Hosted installation instructions? Then please start in with our On-Premise System Requirements page.

Windows (.exe file)

Install Instructions

Double-click the downloaded executable file. You will see a splash screen while GitKraken Desktop is insalled, and then the application will automatically start.

Windows Data Location

GitKraken Desktop data is stored with your home profile in C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Roaming in the .gitkraken folder.

Mac OS (.dmg file)

Install Instructions

Double click the downloaded DMG file and when prompted, drag and drop the GitKraken icon to your Applications folder.

Mac OS Data Location

GitKraken Desktop data is stored in /Users/{user}/.gitkraken == ~/.gitkraken.

Linux (.deb, .rpm, and .tar.gz files)

Note 📝 – GitKraken Desktop currently supports Ubuntu 18.04 LTS+, RHEL 7+, CentOS 7+, and Fedora 34+. While GitKraken Desktop may be able to be installed on other Linux distributions, we cannot guarantee that it will work as expected.

.deb

GitKraken Desktop has a simple package available for Debian based distributions.

wget https://release.gitkraken.com/linux/gitkraken-amd64.deb
sudo apt install ./gitkraken-amd64.deb

Or download the file.

.tar

wget https://release.gitkraken.com/linux/gitkraken-amd64.tar.gz
sudo tar -xvzf gitkraken-amd64.tar.gz

Or download the file.

.rpm

wget https://release.gitkraken.com/linux/gitkraken-amd64.rpm
sudo dnf install ./gitkraken-amd64.rpm

Or download the file.

Note: for older distros that do not have dnf, you should use yum instead.

Snap

Snap is an easy-to-install package for Linux distributions (supported versions above). Get it from the snap store or Snapcraft.io.

Linux Data Location

GitKraken Desktop data is stored in /home/{user}/.gitkraken == ~/.gitkraken.

WSL

If you’re attempting to use GitKraken Desktop within Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), visit our page on How to use GitKraken Desktop with WSL for additional details.

Run GitKraken Desktop

Upon installation, some Linux distros do not automatically create shortcuts to the app.

To run GitKraken Desktop manually, open the terminal and type gitkraken to start the app.