Git Started: Introduction

This tutorial aims to explain Git in a way beginners can understand. These series of posts, cleverly named Git Started, will begin with the major concepts, and we will explore how to use git later on.

What Even is Git?

Many people will answer this by saying “Git is a version control system for tracking changes in computer files.” If you understand this, great! I believe an easier way to think of Git is as a way to save your files at different points in time. Like saving your video game state in new save locations, so you can go back later and replay the different paths. Git does exactly that, just with cheat codes to modify the saved states.

Branches

Okay, you are playing your favorite RPG video game, and you come to a game changing choice. What do you do?

If you are anything like me, you save your game at that point, then go and explore every outcome of the choice to find the best one. This is exactly what Git branches are. Git allows you to branch off of an existing save into a new universe where anything is possible. And you can do this as many times as you want!

Imagine there are too many choices, though, and it would take too long to explore each one. This is where you tag your best friend in and you work in parallel. Similarly, Git lets other people create their own universes too! That’s right, we’re going to throw more people at this problem and let the best universe win.

Merges

Great, so now that we explored all the outcomes in our video game, let’s choose the best one. In Git, this is synonymous to a merge. You can add all the changes made in the other universe to your universe by merging it with yours. This is possible with any two universes, but sometimes they do not agree. In those cases, we need to personally settle the conflicts.

Changing History

Now we are deep in our video game, and we just find out that this one choice at the very beginning of the game caused this huge negative outcome! Let’s turn on our cheats and go change that decision.

Congratulations, you just learned what a rebase is. Git lets you go back through your saves, modify them, and replay your following changes afterwards.

GitHub

As you may know, GitHub is a website that hosts projects and code. To work with GitHub, you first need to clone a repository. This will download all of the files from a project onto your computer. From then on, the saves you make only exist on your computer, and you will need to push them back into the cloud. You can also pull new saves to keep your local copy up to date, in case your friend made progress.

Not only is GitHub a place to publish your projects, it’s also a community for people to collaborate on a single project. They can open issues to give feedback, ask for features, or describe bugs. Others can also fork your project to spawn new universes to experiment in and possibly even request you to pull their changes!

Conclusion

Git is a fantastic tool that gives you complete control over your video game project saves, and GitHub is a great place to collaborate and publish your projects. Hopefully the above concepts are easy to understand, and the [next post]({% post_url 2019-10-10-git-started-basic-usage %}) in this series will go into the usage details of the Git CLI.