Why git

Why Git for your Organization Git for developers Git for marketing Git for product management Git for designers Git for customer support Git for human resources Git for anyone managing a budget.

Git SSH. Git archive. Git Cheatsheet. Getting Started Setting up a repository git init git clone git config git alias. Saving changes git add git commit git diff git stash. Inspecting a repository git status git tag git blame. Undoing changes git checkout git clean git revert git reset git rm. Rewriting history git commit --amend git rebase git rebase -i git reflog.

Collaborating Syncing git remote git fetch git push git pull. Using branches git branch git checkout git merge Merge conflicts Merge strategies. Migrate to Git from SVN. Perforce to Git - why to make the move.

Migrating from Perforce to Git. How to move a Git repository with history. Advanced Tips Advanced Git Tutorials. Merging vs. Resetting, Checking Out, and Reverting. Git submodules. Git subtree. Large repositories in Git. Git LFS. Git gc. Git prune. Git Bash. How to store dotfiles. Git Cherry Pick. Performance The raw performance characteristics of Git are very strong when compared to many alternatives. Being distributed enables significant performance benefits as well.

Security Git has been designed with the integrity of managed source code as a top priority. With Git, you can be sure you have an authentic content history of your source code. Flexibility One of Git's key design objectives is flexibility.

Version control with Git Git is the best choice for most software teams today. While every team is different and should do their own analysis, here are the main reasons why version control with Git is preferred over alternatives: Git is good Git has the functionality, performance, security and flexibility that most teams and individual developers need.

Git is a de facto standard Git is the most broadly adopted tool of its kind. In SVN, each developer gets a working copy that points back to a single central repository. Git, however, is a distributed version control system. Instead of a working copy, each developer gets their own local repository, complete with a full history of commits.

Distributed development also makes it easier to scale your engineering team. Everybody can continue going about their business in their own local repositories.

And, similar to feature branches, distributed development creates a more reliable environment. Many source code management tools such as Bitbucket enhance core Git functionality with pull requests. A pull request is a way to ask another developer to merge one of your branches into their repository. This not only makes it easier for project leads to keep track of changes, but also lets developers initiate discussions around their work before integrating it with the rest of the codebase.

When a developer gets stuck with a hard problem, they can open a pull request to ask for help from the rest of the team. In many circles, Git has come to be the expected version control system for new projects.

In addition, Git is very popular among open source projects. The ultimate result of feature branches, distributed development, pull requests, and a stable community is a faster release cycle.

These capabilities facilitate an agile workflow where developers are encouraged to share smaller changes more frequently. In turn, changes can get pushed down the deployment pipeline faster than the monolithic releases common with centralized version control systems.

As you might expect, Git works very well with continuous integration and continuous delivery environments. You can even build or deploy code from specific branches to different servers. For example, you might want to configure Git to deploy the most recent commit from the develop branch to a test server whenever anyone merges a pull request into it.

Combining this kind of build automation with peer review means you have the highest possible confidence in your code as it moves from development to staging to production.

Marketing can only make one announcement that focuses primarily on the game-changing feature, and the marketing potential of the other two updates is effectively ignored.

The shorter development cycle facilitated by Git makes it much easier to divide these into individual releases. This gives marketers more to talk about, more often. In the above scenario, marketing can build out three campaigns that revolve around each feature, and thus target very specific market segments.

All of these activities can be synchronized with a separate release. The benefits of Git for product management is much the same as for marketing. More frequent releases means more frequent customer feedback and faster updates in reaction to that feedback. Instead of waiting for the next release 8 weeks from now, you can push a solution out to customers as quickly as your developers can write the code. The feature branch workflow also provides flexibility when priorities change.

That initial feature can sit around in its own branch until engineering has time to come back to it. This same functionality makes it easy to manage innovation projects, beta tests, and rapid prototypes as independent codebases. Feature branches lend themselves to rapid prototyping.

This lets designers see how their changes will look in a real working copy of the product without the threat of breaking existing functionality. Encapsulating user interface changes like this makes it easy to present updates to other stakeholders. For example, if the director of engineering wants to see what the design team has been working on, all they have to do is tell the director to check out the corresponding branch.

Pull requests take this one step further and provide a formal place for interested parties to discuss the new interface. Designers can make any necessary changes, and the resulting commits will show up in the pull request. This invites everybody to participate in the iteration process. Go into your project folder and add a local Git repository to the project using the following commands:. Create a file called demo.

Here we will be demoing with just plain text instead of actual code, since the main focus of this article is on Git and not on any specific programming language. Committing is the process in which the code is added to the local repository. Before committing the code, it has to be in the staging area. The staging area is there to keep track of all the files which are to be committed.

Any file which is not added to the staging area will not be committed. This gives the developer control over which files need to be committed. If you want to add all the files inside your project folder to the staging area, use the following command:. Enter a relevant commit message to indicate what code changes were done in that particular commit. Use git status to find out information regarding what files are modified and what files are there in the staging area — it shows other information as well, which we can ignore for now.

Now let us add demo. Up until now we have not created any branch in Git. By default, Git commits go into the master branch. A branch is nothing but a pointer to the latest commit in the Git repository.

Multiple branches are needed to support multiple parallel developments. Refer the image below to see how branches work. Initially, commit 1 and commit 2 were done in the master branch.

At the same time, a different commit 3 and commit 4 are added to the master branch. Here we can see that after Commit 2, two parallel developments are being done in 2 separate branches.

The Test Branch and the Master Branch have diverged here and have different code — the code from Test Branch can be merged with the Master branch using git merge. This will be covered later. We are still in the context of the master branch. In order to switch to the test branch. This commit was done in the Test Branch, and now Test Branch is ahead of Master Branch by 1 commit — as the test branch also includes the 2 commits from the master branch. Currently, Test Branch is ahead of the Master by 1 commit.

This is where git merge is very useful. After running these 2 commands, the merge should be successful.