This tutorial is to get you comfortable working with and understanding some basic git concepts.
But first some intro concepts!
Is basically managing changes in documents or code. As projects get bigger and bigger, it’s very important keep track of changes and versions so we can go back and forth when needed.
- version control system behind Github
- written by Linus Torvald
- to version control the Linux kernel. There are many interfaces to use git, but today we’ll work from the terminal.
Why learn Git:
- keeps a copy of all the older version
- can give you a timeline of changes to files
- structure your projects better
- documentation
- makes sharing and collaborating easier!
After going through this tutorial, you will:
- Understand what version control is about
- Know the basics of how to use Git and GitHub from the command line
- Be able to start using GitHub to share and collaborate!
First, you’ll need:
- git installed
- a github account
- an SSH key added to your Github account
On Github, fork this repo. Your forked repo will give you commands to set up this repo on your machine.
git init
git remote add origin of the repo
Now that you have the site setup, you should be inside your git-tutorial repo folder. If you type git status you’ll see that your repo is up to date.
Now, lets say we want to work on a specific feature. Let’s create a branch called develop.
To do this we use the command git checkout -b develop which creates the develop branch from the branch we’re on (master) and moves us to it.
Open these files in the text editor of your choice. For now, we just have these two files in the repo. This readme.md and an index.html.
Your job is to change the title of our lovely index.html page.
So go ahead and find the <title> Something something </title> and change the words inside the <title> tags.
Now that you’ve changed the title of the page, save the file CTRL+S. Go back to your terminal and type git status.
Now you’ll see a new message. This time git is telling you that a file has been changed! To look at these changes, we use git diff (what’s the difference between my remote branch - the one on github and my local branch - the one on my machine).
This command will output all the changes in the repo. You’ll see your title change here!
Now we want to share our changes with the world. Since we’ve seen the diff, we decide to add these changes to the repo.
We use the command git add PATHTOFILE
Now, to see what happened, run git status. You’ll see that the staged file (which was probably red) is now green, because it’s ready for commit.
Now that we’ve prepared our change, we commit with a message. Use the command git commit -m where the -m flag allows us to type a message like so:
git commit - "Changed the title to something else."
This will commit the change we made to the file with this message. Commit messages are super useful on large projects when you have to hunt down when something was added or removed and why.
Now that you’ve committed, you can take a look at the version control history. To do this, use the command git log --decorate I personally like the --decorate flag because it makes things more interesting.
You can try both. git log and then git log --decorate for your preference.
This will show you the first commit - when I created this repo - and your commit - the changes you just made. Exciting!
Now we’re ready to show the world what we’ve done! Since our commit all ready to go, we just have to push it up to Github. To do this, we use the command git push
You can now go to your forked repo on github.com and take a look at your commit.
***That’s all we’ve got for today! *** There are more exciting things that can be done with Github like pull request and code releases, but we’ll tackle them another time.