Start with GIT

Global information Tracker (GIT) is a revision control system that lets track changes you make to your files over time. With Git you can revert to various states of your files (Like a time machine).

You can also make a copy of your file. make changes to that copy, and then merge these changes to the original copy, and it is not limited to using Git just for source code files, you can also use it to keep track of text files or even images, which means that Git is not just for developers – anyone can find it helpful.

History of Git

Git is a revision control system that arose out of the Linux kernel development community, which had a very specialized need. As thousands of developers spread worldwide, in many different time zones, working on a very complicated project, it was important to be able to coordinate all that work rationally and not lose track of what was going on, So Git was designed for that purpose and it was and it has grown to be used by millions of other projects today.

Start with Git

Git has two ways to deal with it:

• Command-line
• Gui

We will cover here the command line way because I believe that this is the best way to learn it.

First, you need to install Git on your machine and you can do so from Git -Downloads, So After installing git on your system you can initialize your project simply by running :

$git init test-project

where test-project is your project name. that will initialize an empty git repository in your current directory, or if the project is hosted on a server you can get it by running:

$git clone [URL]

where [URL] is the repository link, so once you finish this step you will have a .git folder in your directory which has the repo details and history.

Configure Git

The next thing you will need to do is to set your username and email address. Git will use this information to identify who made specific changes to files.

• To set username and email run:

  $git config --local user.name "your username"
  $git config --local user.email "your email address"

So know your repo is ready to have a file and track its change

Adding files to git

To track files and folders you have to add them to the Git repo as an initial version, so for Git files there are 4 states for any file or folder:

• Untracked
• Staged
• Modified
• Committed

Untracked

Untracked files are the files in the same Git repo but the git repo doesn’t track them, there are two ways to do so:

• By don’t add it to the repo.
• Or by intentionally un-track these files by adding them to a file called .gitignore
  You can know what is the tracked and untracked file by running:

  $git status

Staged

When you want to add files to be tracked by Git or if the files are already tracked but you edited them (Modified them) you have to add them again to the Git repo, you can add files one by one by:

$git add [file]

or you can add all files in the current directory by

$git add *

To list the staged files and folders by

$git diff --staged

To reset the staged files but keep them as modified

$git reset [file]

where [file] is the file you want to reset.

Modified

When you edit a file that is already tracked by Git its status is changed to be modified (M), so the Git repo notices a change in the file but you did not add it to the repo yet, so you can list the Modified files by:

$git status

Or you list only the change that happened to the files

$git diff

Committed

Committed is the last stage for the files in the Git repo which is saving the changed files locally in the local Git repo, you can commit the stages files and folders to the current local repository by:

$git commit -m "A commit message"

The commit message is a description of the edit you have made to the files and folders, and you can list all commit messages by:

$git log

We will discuss the best way to write the commit message in the comming topics so stay tuned