The Git version control system is a powerful tool for managing large and small software development projects. We’ll show you how to get started.
With its egalitarian spirit and tradition of strong community involvement, open source development doesn’t scale very well without some form of version control.
Over the past several years, Git [1] has settled in as the most viable and visible version control tool for the Linux space. Git was created by Linus Torvalds himself, and it got its start as the version control system for the Linux kernel development community (see the box entitled “The Birth of Git”). Since then, Git has been adopted by hundreds of open source projects and is the featured tool on several large code-hosting sites, such as GitHub.
Even if you aren’t a professional developer, if you work in the Linux space, you occasionally need to download and compile source code, and, more often than not, that means interacting with Git. Many Linux users pick up occasional Git commands on the fly without ever getting a formal introduction to what Git is and how it works. This article is the first in a two-part series aimed at building a better understanding of Git for everyday Linux users. This first article shows how to install Git, create a Git project, commit changes, and clone the repository to a remote location. Next month, you’ll learn some advance techniques for managing code in Git.
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