Git Overview

Video Review

• Git is a version control system. It helps you control the different versions of the files in your project.
• The collection of all the old versions of your project's files is known as a Git repository. It's basically just a folder in which you can edit your files, then run Git commands to store your changes.
• Each time you complete a change to some or all of your project's files, you can take a snapshot of their current contents. These snapshots are known as commits.
• Git is a distributed version control system, as opposed to a centralized system. In a distributed system, you can copy a complete repository with the full project history to every developer's machine.
• Bash is a command shell that runs on many Mac, Linux, and even some Windows computers when you open their terminals.
• Bash prompts usually end in a dollar sign. When you read Git tutorials out on the web, you may see a dollar sign; that usually indicates that the text following it should be typed at a shell prompt.
• When Git is installed on a system, like it is here in this workspace, it places an executable named git where it can be run from any shell prompt. This is the git command.
• All the commands we're going to show you during this course will use this executable, so they're all going to start with git followed by a space.
• Then we need to specify the subcommand or options we want.
• Git command line options consist of either a single dash followed by a single letter, or a double-dash [type --] followed by a word.
• git --help will print out some help on using the Git program.

Common Git subcommands

• The git clone and git init commands are used to setup new repositories.
• The git add, git status, and git commit commands are the most frequently used subcommands in all of Git. They're used when committing new versions of files.
• The git log command is also important; it lets you view a list of your old commits.
• The git mv and git rm commands move and remove files that are being tracked by Git. We'll learn about those in Stage 2 of this course.
• The git push and git pull commands are used to synchronize commits with Git repositories on other computers. We'll learn about those in Stage 3.