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Getting Started with Git

Once you git, you'll never go back!

Kushagra Acharya's photo
Kushagra Acharya
·

4 min read

Table of contents

Git and Github

  • Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
  • Github is a famous online version control platform made over git and currently owned by Microsoft.

What is version control or source control?

Version control, also known as source control, is the practice of tracking and managing changes to software code. It is used to maintain project in a remote location so people working on the project can come together in a common understanding while updating or developing features for the software.

Basic git example

Must have

  • git installed on your machine, downloading git will give you a software called GitBash which is a kind of terminal. Linux user do not require git installation.
  • Github account. Make a Github account and remember the username, email and password.

Example

  • On your desktop folder, create a folder called myproject
  • Inside myproject make a file code.txt
  • Write "hello git!" inside the code.txt and save it and close the file.
  • Now open git bash inside myproject folder (do right click and Git Bash here).
  • In the terminal do the following serially:
    • git init
    • git add .
    • git commit -m "init"
  • If the terminal shows something like git config --global user.name ... follow these steps else skip this step and move to next
  • Adding git config is done only for the first time you've installed git on your machine
  • After your ADD and COMMIT successfully
    • go to github.com and login
    • create a new public repository (uncheck create readme.md if it is checked)
    • after creating a new repository you will see a lot of instructions on how to push the code to Github.
    • find a line somewhere mentioned as git remote add origin {url}, COPY this.
    • paste this to your Git Bash terminal and press enter.
    • this will now link your git project on your machine to the git project on Github, this basically says that when you PUSH on git bash terminal, the content where you did git init in this case inside myproject folder will now go and update on your Github repository that you created few minutes ago.
    • After adding remote to origin, do git push -u origin master.
  • After you have successfully pushed your BRANCH master to Github, you can now refresh Github and see the update with commit message on the top.
  • In this way you've successfully pushed your local file code.txt to your Github repository.

Branching

As we now know how to push a project folder contents to our own Github repository, now lets see branching. Branching is a very important part of version controlling where we make multiple branches of our master branch and add/remove/update the contents.

Example

  • In your Git Bash inside the myproject folder, do git branch, this will show you all the branches that we currently have ON our local machine.
  • Currently you will only see master or sometimes main as by default git when initializing will create only master/main branch.
  • The content of the code.txt currently has "hello git!" in this master branch.
  • do git branch dev, this will create dev branch which is an exact copy of master branch.
  • do git checkout dev, with this we are now inside dev branch and every change we do now will only be in dev branch. code.txt file in master branch will NOT have any change.
  • change "hello git!" to "hello Github dev branch!", save the file. do not forget to SAVE!.
  • every code change you do must be saved before ADDING and PUSHING.
  • now do, git add ., this is meant to add all the new changes you've done inside myproject folder.
  • now do, git commit -m "new changes on dev", which is an informative message to let you/others know what change have you done in this commit.
  • now do git push origin dev, remember the 1st time we did git push -u origin master? -u in only required for the very first push.
  • check your dev branch in Github, the file code.txt will now have a different content than what we have on master branch.
  • you can keep on editing->saving->adding->pushing on the dev branch or creating more branches form dev or master with different contents as you wish.

Sharing

  • You can share your Github repo to your friend, ask him to git clone {your project git}.
  • Initially the clone will ONLY FETCH the first branch that we pushed. In this case master.
  • To get branches other than master, your friend must do git fetch origin dev. This will copy your dev branch from your repo to your friend's machine.

Assignment 01

  • Create a new project with a details.json file in a folder with following content and push it to a NEW git repository named as mad-assignment-01

    {
"name":"Your name",
"class":"Your class",
"Roll":"Your role",
"Contact":"Your contact"
}

  • Remember that the repository should be PUBLIC so I can evaluate your task, and give you a grade! Best of luck~

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