GIT and Version Control Fundamentals

What is GIT and Version Control?

• GIT is a free and open-source distributed version control system that efficiently handles small to large projects.
• Version control is a system that tracks changes, allows collaborative development, and keeps records of who made changes, what changes were made, and when.

Key Concepts in Version Control

• Snapshots: Records of a project's file history at a given point in time.
• Commit: The act of creating a snapshot, which contains three pieces of information: file changes, parent commit reference, and a hash code name.
• Repositories: Collections of files and their history, which can exist on a local machine or remote server (GitHub).
• Cloning: Copying a repository from a remote server, allowing teams to work together.
• Pulling and Pushing: Downloading commits from a remote repository (pulling) and adding local changes to the remote repository (pushing).

Branches and Merging

• All commits in Git live on some branch.
• A project can have multiple branches, with the main branch often being the "master" branch.
• HEAD refers to the most recent commit on a branch.
• Merging: Combining changes from one branch into another, typically from a feature branch into the master branch.

GitHub (Cloud Storage of Code)

• The largest and most advanced development platform for building, shipping, and maintaining software.
• Allows for collaborative coding, automation, security, project management, and team administration.
• Features include automatic environment setup, continuous integration and delivery, code reviews, and vulnerability identification.

Basic Git Commands and Configurations

• Git configuration: git config --global user.name "John Doe" and git config --global user.email [email protected].
• Creating a remote repository: git init, git add ., git commit -m "first commit", git remote add origin , and git push -u origin master.
• Adding a single file to a GitHub repository: git add , git commit -m "single file push", and git push.
• Creating a new branch and pushing from it: git branch -m "branch_name" and git push.