Git Basics

• Git Basics
  • Version control
  • Git and how it operates
    • Modify
    • Staged
    • Committed
  • Basic workflow commands in git
  • What can we use git log and git diff for?
• Distributed Version Control
  • Git vs GitHub
  • How to link Git and GitHub
  • Creating a new branch

Version control

Put simply it is the practice of tracking and managing changes made to software. It allows us as developers to jump into a project and instantly get an understanding on where the project is going and where it has been without having to search too many documents and files.

Git and how it operates

Git is a popular Version Control System (VCS), it is distributed, so it is local to the user's hardware. Git is a program that when downloaded and ran can be used to track and manage changes to files and directories.
How Git operates is what makes it so popular. Git takes snapshots of a project or folder and saves the changed files whilst linking the other files to their previous versions. If I was to have 3 files in Git after updating file A Git would track the change to file A and then copy the data from the previous version of file B and C.
Other VCSs just trak the changes made to the project.

There are three stages in Git, Modify Staged and Commit.

Modify

Projects are on the shelf, if you were to commit now nothing would be saved. These files have been modified but the change won't affect produce a new version

Staged

These files have been changed and if committed Git would produce a new version. It's almost like putting a file into a shopping cart, it hasn't been purchased, but it is not on the shelf anymore.

Committed

A snapshot is taken of the folder profile, and it is saved into a repository.

Basic workflow commands in git

• git init This creates a git repository in the corresponding directory
• git status This shows which files/ folders are staged (ready to be committed)
• git add This adds a file/folder to the stage (ready to be committed)
• git commit -m This commits the staged files/folders to the git repo
• .gitignore This creates a folder that hides other folders from git status

What can we use git log and git diff for?

• git log Shows the commit history to the corresponding repository
• git diff Helps me see, compare and understand changes between different commits

Distributed Version Control

Diagram 1

Diagram 2

Git vs GitHub

Diagram 1 shows the link between users and Git, a local repository. Diagram 2 shows the link between local repositories and GitHub a cloud based repository. With a local repo everyone connected dumps their files into one repo which can lead to problems when people commit at the same time. The benefits of a cloud based repo or a distributed version control is that users can simultaneously commit their files and projects without there being a problem because they are independently committed.

• GitHub
  GitHub is a could based distributed version control, it doesn't require every user link to a repo via hardware (locally). Github does have a few competitors such as Bitbucket and GitLab and others.

How to link Git and GitHub

GitHub gives clear commands to type into GitBash as listed below

git remote add origin https://github.com/temianibaba/tech258_git.git
git branch -M main
git push -u origin main

• When you haven't initialised a local repo

echo "# test" >> README.md
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin https://github.com/temianibaba/test.git
git push -u origin main

Creating a new branch

git branch #(name branch)
git checkout #(name branch) - moves to new branch
git branch -d #branch_name - delete branch