Git is a distributed version control system that allows for efficient branching and merging. It tracks changes to files and allows multiple users to edit files simultaneously. Users initialize a Git project by creating a hidden .git directory to store change information. They can then add and commit changes, check the status of changes, and view commit logs. Users can also create branches to work in parallel and merge branches together once work is complete. Git enables collaboration through remote repositories hosted on services like GitHub.

1. Intro to Git
Why and How

2. What is Git?
• Distributed Version Control system (DVC)
• Used/Developed by maintainers of Linux
Kernel (Linus Torvalds)
• Fast and Efficient Branching/Merging
• Great hosted services for offsite
repositories (e.g. github.com)

3. What is Version Control?
• Snapshots changes in a corpus of text/files
• e.g. “track revisions” in MS Word
• Allows multiple people to edit corpus
• Can be used for anything that changes over time
• Software
• CV
• Legal Documents

4. What is DVC?
• Distributed Version Control
Remote Remote Remote
Push/Pull
You

5. How do I get started?
• Initialize a Git project
• git init .
• This creates a .git folder which stores the
git index (amongst other things)
• Add something to the project
• git add .
• git commit -m “first checkin”

6. How do I track changes?
• Change your files then add them to your
change set
• git add . or git add somefile
• Check out what has happened
• git status (shows current changeset)
• git log (shows recent commits)

7. Working with others
• Add a remote host (if starting out)
• Github is free and very good
• git remote add hostname hosturl
• Push your changes
• git push hostname branchname
• You can also ‘git clone’ a remote host if it already
exists
• git pull

8. Merging/Branching
• Allows working on multiple versions in parallel
• git branch somenewbranch
• git checkout somenewbranch
• Can push/pull on each branch independently
• Finish a branch by merging back to the source branch (or
elsewhere)
• git merge somenewbranch
• N.B. this merges somenewbranch into your current
branch

9. Questions?
• Checkout http://www.github.com
• GUIS:
• http://mac.github.com/
• http://code.google.com/p/tortoisegit/