Git is software for distributed version control. When you use Git to manage the files in a project, you're essentially taking snapshots of those files as you make changes to them. Doing this enables you to track back through the history of your changes, understand that history, and return to an earlier state of the project whenever necessary.
The distributed aspect of Git distinguishes it from many other version control systems. Git permits multiple users to maintain copies of a project on their own machines, work on the project files offline, then push their changes to a shared file repository in a way that avoids conflicts between different users' changes.
Finally, Git makes it easy to make someone else's project the starting point for your own. This workshop was forked from https://github.com/DHRI-Curriculum, a workshop created by folks at the CUNY Graduate Center's GC Digital Initiatives.
All these features of Git make it an attractive way to collaborate transparently on projects large and small.
Some common uses for Git include:
- developing software
- sharing data sets
- creating websites
- writing articles and books
- collating online resources
- keeping research notes
- hosting syllabi and course materials
This workshop will offer a high-level overview of Git and its related cloud-based service GitHub, emphasizing a few of the ways they can be useful to DH projects. Although Git's most powerful features are available only when it's used via the command line, we'll do our work today from Git's web interface, an easier place to start.
To use the web interface you'll need to create an account on GitHub. If you want to participate in the hands-on portion of this workshop but you haven't yet created an account on GitHub, you should do that now.
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Glossary
Cheat Sheet
Repos and Forks
Sandbox
Branching
Creating a File
Markdown
Initiating a Pull Request
Reviewing a Pull Request
Summary
DH Examples
Session Developers: Paul Schacht, William Jones, Kirk Anne
Based on previous work by Patrick Sweeney, Jojo Karlin, Jennifer Tang, Stephen Zweibel, and Mary Catherine McKinniburgh
Digital Research Institute (DRI) Curriculum by Graduate Center Digital Initiatives is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Based on a work at https://github.com/DHRI-Curriculum. When sharing this material or derivative works, preserve this paragraph, changing only the title of the derivative work, or provide comparable attribution.