Just starting out with Git and GitHub? It gets easier, honest!

A familiar sentiment for anyone starting out with Git

No doubt you have heard of Git or GitHub for source control, but what is source control?

This is a basic overview of source code control and the advantages of using it within a team environment or using it on your own, if you do a Google search for source code control you can read how Wikipedia defines Source control, as:

“Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of information.”

Cool story br0! In other words: Source control allows distributed work in teams of any size, at different locations, while avoiding conflicts in source code changes.

Really!? Thanks for clearing that up!

Lets look at it this way…

In its simplest term it’s like a “Save As”. You want the new file without getting rid of the changes on the old one. It’s an everyday situation, except on a software project there is the potential for a lot of changes.

Concepts

There are some basic concepts about version control I’ll quickly go over here, these terms used in many SCM systems some relevant to Git and GitHub some to other systems.

Repository/repo: The database storing the files.

Branch: Create a separate copy of a repo for use on your computer.

Revert/rollback: Go back to a previously saved version of the codebase/repo.

Push: Push is an access level on the repo, if you have no push access you will need to make a pull request.

Pull: If you have no Push access you can make a pull request which will notify the repo owner you want to merge your changes into their code.

If you are just starting out then your most used commands will probably be :

git add .git commit -m 'some informative message'git push origin master

Those commands have served me well in my early days of learning how to get my code back up to GitHub.

Git and GitHubGit and GitHub are two separate things, Git is a free and open source version control system whilst GitHub uses Git technology to host your repositories on the GitHub.com servers.

Git and GitHub were a bit confusing for me when I first started out with them, I was familiar with VCS before but that was in the shape of Microsoft’s Visual SourceSafe and Team Foundation Server where you have a nice GUI to guide you through the check-in and check-out process, for those the process was:

• Check-out: make a copy of the repository you wanted to make changes to on your machine, once you have made your change then, Check-in your changes.
• Check-in: add your changes back to the repository with an accompanying message detailing the change you have made.

With Git it’s a bit less fancy, all via the command line, but pretty much the same as with VSS and TFS.

• Clone the repository: Make a copy of the repo on your machine.
• Make changes.
• Once the changes are made then add them back with accompanying commit messages.
• Push the changes back to the repo on Github.

The documentation on GitHub is fantastic for anything you want to achieve and in this post I have referenced some the documentation.

It can get a bit overwhelming though, especially if you get out of sync, i.e. forget to pull a change made on the remote then try to check your changes in before pulling the changes into your local version. I’m by no means confident if things go a bit wrong but I have developed a “Commit Often Perfect Later” approach so if you do break something you din’t lose too much of you valuable time trying to work out what went wrong where.

If you take a look at a repo you have cloned from GitHub you will see there is a file called .git this is like a little database of all the changes you have made on your machine and it contains all the information it needs to connect to GitHub and make the changes it needs to make to the master repo [or whatever branch you’re pushing the changes to].

I made a cheat sheet Gist which I used every time I went near Git, it has now turned into a repo of other cheat sheets I still use on a daily basis.

In it I cover these situations:

• Make a new project on your machine that you want to add to GitHub? Look here.
• Cloning a repo from someone else’s GitHub and pushing it to a repo on my GitHub, or “I didn’t make a fork, what do I do now!”
• You have a fork which you need to update before making any changes.

Workflow will be different for differing situations, for me as a noob developer I have tried to document anything I have come across with Git so I can reference back to it for that one time I need it but can’t remember what I did at 21:45 on a Wednesday just to get the code checked into GitHub.

There are many GUIs that integrate with Git for use with GitHub the official GitHub one is pretty nice but I quickly got into situations that the GUI couldn’t get me out of so I have stuck with the terminal since, well there is VSCode though which has a beautiful Git UI that I use daily, but there are some things that I still use the terminal for:

git statusgit checkout <branch-name>git [push] tags

All pretty handy, there is probably extensions out there to help with these but for now I’m pretty comfortable doing it via the command line.

Any tips or tricks you use in Git you’d like to share? Please feel free to leave a comment or better still add to the repo via a pull request.

If any of this has helped you in any way feel free to like the article and share it on social media.

Many thanks.