Git and Github

A quick tutorial on how to use git and github the online home for the world's open-source code.

First: Overview

Git is a "version control" system.

It takes snapshots of your code (or any files) called commits that act as little time-capsules.

At any time you can checkout a any moment in time that has been commited to the repository (the timeline of commits for your codebase).

The key reasons to use something like git are to:

Protect your codebase against accidental errors/deletions/bugs (if you have a time-machine you can go back and restore the timeline)
Allow remote sharing of resources/code between many team members
Creating (forking) parallel universes called branches that let any team member make a xerox of the entire codebase and go full mad-scientist in their own world
Take only the best parts of the mad-science and merge those parts back into the main codebase (the master branch). When done on github this is called a pull request
It is very good at taking two people's independent changes to the same file and merging the edits.

Git mixes google drive with the best parts of the blockchain, creating a permanent record of the timeline, and allowing sharing across teams.

commit a snapshot of the codebase to be remembered forever git commit -m "commit message here"
branch one cohesive of commits which can trace back every change (delta) from the beginning to that moment in history
master the default branch which should be used for production worthy code with the fewest amount of errors
checkout to leave one branch and load up another git checkout somebranch this can include previous commits
fork to create a new branch from an existing branch git checkout -b newbranch
clone to make an exact copy of a codebase into a new location git clone URLHERE
push to take local commits and share them to the a central repository (like github) git push origin master
pull to grab commits from the central repository into your workspace git pull origin master
log the record of commits on your current branch git log