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Intro to Version Control with Git and Github

What are we trying to accomplish?

By the end of this lecture you'll understand how to use the command-line program Git (git) to manage changes to a project in a way that allows you to keep track of those changes and roll them back if necessary - a process known as version control. Additionally, you'll learn how to integrate Git with the website Github so they changes will be backed up on the internet for the sake of posterity and making it easier to visually explore your project.

Version control software is critically important for modern software development. In addition to tracking changes and safely being able to "undo" work, it also lets you safely collaborate on the same codebase with others without causing problems (or "conflicts") for each other, and manage and share different variations of your codebase.

Git is one of the most popular version-control tools and some understanding of it is a pre-requisite for every software engineer, regardless of your level of experience. Git was created by Linus Torvaldis, the creator of Linux, to help manage the challenges of a remote, distributed team. It has become widely used, especially in the open-source community. We will focus on git and github in this course. Some other version control tools are Mercurial and SVN. Learning git will also prepare you to use these other tools if you encounter them in your career.

Lectures & Assignment

Lectures

Assignments

Terminal Learning Objectives

  • Clone an existing Github repo to create a local copy
  • Link a local git repo to any 'remote' repo (including one we just created on Github) by changing the remote url
  • Push local changes to a remote repo
  • Pull remote changes to keep the local repo in sync

Enabling Learning Objectives

  • Understand the essential git workflow
    • Checking the 'status' of your git repo
    • Staging untracked files to make git aware of the changes
    • Commiting staged/tracked files into a unique changeset & pushing that commit to a remote repo.
  • Understand the concept of 'branches'
    • Understand how to create a new branch
    • Understand how to switch between branches
  • Upgrading a regular folder into a Git repository
  • Understand how to fork an existing Github repo