Simple tutorial for using git for UAARG projects.
We use git for:
- Keeping track of changes to all of our software
- Writing software collaboratively, with lots of people on a team
Both of these are pretty important when writing software. You don't want to make a major change that breaks everything and have no way to go back to a working version. You also don't want to email around individual changes to your code and then end up with a mess of different versions.
git is a tool that lets you avoid that. More specifically, it's a software version control tool.
Clone the repository. Type this in at your command line:
git clone https://github.com/uaarg/gitTutorial.git
This makes a version of the repository on your computer in a new folder called gitTutorial. You can see that all of the files in the gitTutorial Github repository have been downloaded to your computer.
A repository is different from just a folder with a bunch of code in it because it has the full history of the project as well. Use a git log to see the project history.
git will know about any changes you make to files inside the repo. Type git status to see the status of any changes you have. To actually log these changes, you need to commit them.
There's a file called names.txt in this repo. Edit this in your favourite text editor (you can use gedit on Ubuntu) and add your name to the file. (or a nice/terrible message if you like)
Type a git status again, and you should see some changes show up like this:
# On branch master
#
# Changes not staged for commit:
# (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
# (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
#
# modified: names.txt
#
These changes won't automatically be committed. As far as git is concerned, changes you make in a repo fall under 3 categories:
- Changes in your working directory. This is like items that you've got in a warehouse that you want to ship eventually.
- Changes in your staging area. This is like items that you've put on the loading dock of a warehouse.
- Changes that have been committed. This is like items that you actually load from the dock onto a truck to be shipped off.
To get your changes from the working directory to the staging area, use git add [file_name]. In this case it'll be git add names.txt.
# On branch master
#
# Changes to be committed:
# (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
# modified: names.txt
#
To commit this change, use git commit -m "[commit message]", eg. git commit -m "I added my name for the file. Am I a git master now???".
[master 184919b] I added my name for the file. Am I a git master now???
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
If you've set everything up properly, git push will do this.