If you never used Git it can be hard to start. With this series of blogs and video’s, I want to help you get started. We are gonna start on the terminal! If you’re not used to the terminal (some call it command line), I do my best to show you it is not scary!
Let’s get started with Git 🚀🔥
If you prefer reading over watching a video? Scroll down, below the video, everything is written down.
What is Git?
Git is nowadays the way to keep your projects save! Your own small project or the projects of big teams inside companies.
A short version of the explanation is, Git will keep track of all the changes of your project. It will show who did make a change, what is changed and when it changed.
You can always go back to an earlier state of the code if you want to.
Git is not only suitable for programming projects, but also very suitable for other types of files. Design files for example!
Install Git
First, we have to install Git in order to use it. Git is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Go to the Git website and download the version for your OS.
If you have any problems with the installation, please let me know in the comments or hit me on Twitter or Instagram DM.
Setup your git credentials
In order to get your name and email right with every commit you do. You need to set the git name and git email.
Set your git user.name
Open the terminal and type git config --global user.name “Your Name” to set the name you will be using on your machine for Git. If you remove the —global option, then this name will only be set in that repository you are in.
You can check it with git config user.name command. If you did it right, your name will appear.
Set your git user.email
Open the terminal and type git config --global user.email your@email.com to set the name you will be using on your machine for Git. If you remove the —global option, then this name will only be set in that repository you are in.
You can check it with git config user.email command. If you did it right, your email will appear.
Setting your git password
Your password can’t be set in the same way. When you push your changes to a remote repository, your password will be asked in the terminal.
But if you don’t like to type it every time you push your changes then use a helper.
For windows: git config --global credential.helper wincred
For Mac: git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain
For Linux: git config --global credential.helper cache
Read some more tips on the Github documentation website.
Start a Git project
There are few ways to start a project with Git.
- Start with initializing Git in a local folder on your computer
- Create a new project on Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab or any other company that is hosting Git repositories.
Create a Git project locally
Let’s start with initializing Git in a local folder on your computer.
Open the terminal and type git init and hit enter.
With this command, there will be a hidden .git/ folder. In this folder, all your changes will be saved. Eventually also all the changes others will make to this repository if you pull those changes. But git pull will be in another episode.
Create a Git project on Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab or somewhere else
It is also possible to start your project with creating the repository remotely. Remote is the external service/company that is hosting your Git repository on a server.
Github is the most popular for a large amount of opensource projects. Bitbucket is most used by people who want to keep there code private or bigger companies that are also using other Atlassian software. Gitlab is a newer service, but I heard good sounds about it.
Offcourse there are a lot more or you can host your own. But your codebase should be somewhere on a server where it is safe! You can get a copy of the whole repository by typing git clone followed by the git-repository-url.
Like this for example:
git clone https://github.com/raymonschouwenaar/git-demo-project or if you want to decide the name of the folder, then add the folder name after the url. git clone https://github.com/raymonschouwenaar/git-demo-project project-name
In my video, I showed you how to create a repository on Github. So check it out if you don’t know how to do it.
Do you need help?
I hope this first episode/blog helped you setting up Git and gave you a little introduction to using it. If you need any help, please let me know in the comments! I would ❤️ to help you out!
Originally published at Mr Frontend Blog.
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