Getting Git right
Learn Git with tutorials, news, and tips
Overview
Git basics
Git is a free and open-source version control system, originally created by Linus Torvalds in 2005. Unlike older centralized version control systems such as SVN and CVS, Git is distributed: every developer has the full history of their code repository locally. This makes the initial clone of the repository slower, but subsequent operations such as commit, blame, diff, merge, and log dramatically faster.
Git also has excellent support for branching, merging, and rewriting repository history, which has led to many innovative and powerful workflows and tools. Pull requests are one such popular tool that allows teams to collaborate on Git branches and efficiently review each other's code. Git is the most widely used version control system in the world today and is considered the modern standard for software development.
How Git works
Here is a basic overview of how Git works:
- Create a "repository" (project) with a git hosting tool (like Bitbucket)
- Copy (or clone) the repository to your local machine
- Add a file to your local repo and "commit" (save) the changes
- "Push" your changes to your main branch
- Make a change to your file with a git hosting tool and commit
- "Pull" the changes to your local machine
- Create a "branch" (version), make a change, commit the change
- Open a "pull request" (propose changes to the main branch)
- "Merge" your branch to the main branch
Git download
Mac OS/X
Windows
Linux
Learn Git
Learn Git
Beginner
Getting started
Collaborating
Migrating to Git
Advanced tips
Top articles
Git or SVN? How Nuance Healthcare chose a Git branching model?
This is a guest post from Matt Shelton at Nuance Healthcare. This is the first post in a series about his team moving from Subversion to Git, why they did it, and...
Dealing with Maven dependencies when switching to Git
So we're moving to Git and we like git-flow. Now what? Let's test it all out! My team is great. They threw together a hit list of developer workflows in Confluence...
Did you know...
Branch
Definition: A branch represents an independent line of development. Branches serve as an abstraction for the edit/stage/commit process discussed in Git Basics, the first module of this series. You can think of them as a way to request a brand new working directory, staging area, and project history. New commits are recorded in the history for the current branch, which results in a fork in the history of the project.