Time Requirement: 2 hrs
This tutorial is meant to be a quick start for someone new to the world of version control. It is not meant to be exhaustive or deep by any stretch of the imagination, but is meant to be a compilation of the common uses of Git and most Googled references to address these problems.
This tutorial is most useful to those who have some background in programming in any language but not in version control.
It is especially useful to those who have a need to keep snapshots of their code at various points in time or work collaboratively. For example:
- A researcher drawing insights from data while the data and/or the insights to be drawn change over time.
- A team training a machine learning model and deploying it in a web app.
Windows, Mac, or Linux operating system.
This tutorial will walk you through a sample project in which you will provide feature ideas and pseudocode for apps you want to see built.
- Part I covers the basic steps which will enable you to pull code from your remote repository (hosted on Github.com), make changes to it and push those changes back to this remote repository.
- Part II covers slightly more advanced concepts such as handling branches.
- Part III covers more advanced topics in branching such as merging branches and conflict resolution.
- Part IV covers contributing to open source projects.
There is a variety of graphical user interface (GUI) softwares available through which we can use Git such as Github Desktop and VS code. These make it quite easy to perform the most common applications with Git. However, in this tutorial, we insist on using the command line interface (CLI) tools. This is for the following reasons:
- Exhaustiveness: To quote the Pro Git book,
...the command line is the only place you can run all Git commands — most of the GUIs implement only a partial subset of Git functionality for simplicity.
- Simplicity: Due to this, it is much easier to use your favorite GUI when you learn the CLI than going the other way around.
- Universality: There will be situations where the GUI will not be available. Most importantly, if you were to use it on a remote server which commonly occurs during deployment.
Thus, we recommend that the users accept the short-term pain of using CLI to ease their long-term journey of version control.
Version control is a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that you can recall specific versions later.
-Pro Git
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Simply put, if you make a change to your code, Git allows you a way to go back to it.
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Additionally, if you are developing something collaboratively, it allows you to incorporate code from your teammates while keeping track of your work. This can include new features, performance improvements, documentation, and a lot more.
So, if you are developing any kind of an application in a modern setting, version control is a very powerful tool to have.
Git is the most widely used version control system. It was made by the same people who developed Linux and especially by Linus Torvalds. More history in given in Pro Git.
- Chacon, S. and Straub, B. Pro git, 2014.
- Burgess, A. Easy version control with Git, 2009.
- A visual Git reference
- Working directory definition https://stackoverflow.com/questions/36201342/git-where-exactly-is-the-working-directory.
- Staging: Crunchify https://crunchify.com/git-repository-what-stage-means-in-git-source-control/.
- Staging: GeeksforGeeks https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/staging-in-git/.