Git for Smart Beginners

This post won’t get you into any technical details of git; it’s more of “philosophy of git.”

The first thing to understand about git is that it is totally distributed. The source control on your local machine is *the* source. You then push and pull to whatever other repositories you want. Sure: your team might use one central repository that you all push and pull from, but that doesn’t make it the way git is *designed* to work.

The second thing to understand is that everything in git is a branch. Sure, there’s a “master” branch by default, but that’s just convention. “master” is actually no more important than any other branch.

Now after what I just said, you might find this next one confusing. Branches are just labels in git. So the branch “master” is a collection of commits and whatever other branch you have is just another collection of commits. When you merge branches, you’re just combining those histories. So (unlike subversion) when you delete a branch that is merged into another branch: you do not lose any of your history.

Branching is soooo easy. Make a branch for everything. Want to try something out (even if it’s small): make a branch, try it, if it works merge it into whatever branch you’re working on.

Here are some resources:
svn -> git
git docs
github

Here’s a real quick romp through all the commands you’ll probably need.

1. Setup an account at github
2. create a test repository
3. follow those initial steps that github gives you
4. now cd into your newly created git repository
5. type “git branch”
6. you’ll notice that master has a little * next to it like “* master” that indicates that you are in the master branch
7. type “git branch -a” now you’ll notice there’s also an origin/master now… orgin/master is a branch that is tracking the branch “master” at github you setup “origin” when you setup your repository initially
8. type “git checkout -b my_new_branch”
9. type “git branch -a” you’ll now notice that you are in the branch my_new_branch which is a branch off the master branch
10. type “git push origin my_new_branch” – Yay! you just pushed a new branch up to github
11. type “git checkout master” and then “git branch” – you’ll see you’re back in master
12. type “git fetch” and you just pulled down all the changes (there won’t be any) from github
13. type “git merge origin/master” and you just merged the remote changes into your local master

That’s most of the commands you’ll need.

Hope that helped.