Git Overview

Version Control/Source Control

Does this look familiar?

Or this?

Tools like Dropbox and Google Drive provide some versioning.

Previous Versions (Dropbox) or Revision History (Google) are useful in recovering work from a certain point in time.
Limits on how long versions are available.
Difficult to view differences.
Difficult to collaborate as there is a single copy of the document.

Git to the Rescue!

What is a repository?

Think of it as a smart directory that tracks your file history.

What is git?

Open source software to track changes to your files.
Distributed version control.

How do we set it up?

$ git init

This command creates a .git directory which you might think of as a database to keep track of the changes you make to your files. This is done automatically when we use "git clone".

    $ git clone SOME_REMOTE_URL

This create a directory, adds a .git directory to it, and copies any files from the remote repository.

How do we use it?

The basic Git workflow goes something like this:

You modify files in your working directory.
You stage the files, adding snapshots of them to your staging area.
You do a commit, which takes the files as they are in the staging area and stores that snapshot permanently to your Git directory.
You push to a remote repository (for now, think of this as your back up).