Git Workflow

Learning Goals

• Review Git basics
• Preview Git workflow

Introduction

Developers use version control systems (VCS) to organize our code and the most commonly used VCS is Git. Git provides a number of tools and techniques we can use to improve our effectiveness as developers: creating backups, creating "save points" where which we can "undo" to, sharing work between team-mates. Remember, Git, and VCS in general, are all about giving us the ability to be unafraid to make changes. By putting risk in check, we gain freedom. That's a great place to be in when we're writing code!

Review Git Basics

At this point, there are several Git actions we should feel comfortable doing, including:

• Identify how to initialize a Git repository with git init
• Check the status of a repository with git status
• Prepare file changes to be committed with git add
• Create a commit and apply a commit message with git commit
• Copy a repository to your local machine with git clone
• List remotes with git remote
• Duplicate other organizations' repositories into your own via GitHub with git fork
• Create a remote repository on GitHub
• Connect a local repository to a remote repository with git remote
• Send code to the remote repo with git push

If any of these seem less familiar than others, this is a good time to go back to those lessons or resources and strengthen our understanding of them. We'll need these basics as we move on to more Git.

Preview Git Workflow

Git gives us a lot of special powers and over the next several lessons we'll explore some more of them. We'll learn one of the most useful Git features, branching. Specifically, we'll see how to:

• Create a branch
• Delete a branch
• Push a branch
• Pull a branch
• Discuss local and remote branches
• Merge a branch
• Practice merging branches

Enrich Existing Git Skills

In addition, to accomplish the work we just described with branches, we'll sometimes need Git to help us get more information or correct mistakes.

• Review a repository’s history ("Tell me the story of how this codebase changed since 4 days ago...")
• Review a Git commit's "diff" ("What changed in that commit?")
• Unstage changes ("Don't add that to a commit!")
• Revert changes ("Undo that commit!")

By the time we've worked through these lessons, you'll have a list of new Git tools to use in your regular coding workflow.

Conclusion

Building on the Git basics we've already acquired, we're now prepared to learn more advanced Git actions like working with branches, examining Git history and manipulating changes.

Resources

• Git Basics at git-scm.com