The Beginner’s Guide to Git & GitHub
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What is Git?
Git is a free, open-source version control software. It was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005. This tool is a version control system that was initially developed to work with several developers on the Linux kernel.
This basically means that Git is a content tracker. So Git can be used to store content — it is mostly used to store code due to the other features it provides.
Real life projects generally have multiple developers working in parallel. So a version control system like Git is needed to ensure there are no code conflicts between the developers.
Additionally, the requirements in such projects change often. So a version control system allows developers to revert and go back to an older version of the code.
A branch system in Git allows developers to work individually on a task (Ex:- One branch -> One task OR One branch -> One developer). Basically think Git as a small software application that controls your code base, it you’re developer.
Git Repositories
If we want to start using Git, we need to know where to host our repositories. Repository (shortly “Repo”) a project that contains multiple files. In our case a repository will contain code-base files. There are two hosting platforms to host our repositories. One, Online (On the cloud) and second, Offline (Self-installed on your server). There are three most popular Git hosting services. They are GitHub (Owned by Microsoft), GitLab (Owned by GitLab) and BitBucket. We’ll use GitHub as our hosting service.
Before using Git & GitHub we should know why we need it?
1. It makes it easy to contribute to your open source projects:
If you want to contribute, you just fork a project, make your changes and then send them a pull request.
2. Documentation:
Help sections and guides have articles for nearly any topic related to git that you can think of.
