Learning Git as a beginner web developer
There are so many web technologies to learn as a beginner web developer whether you decide to become a Front End or Back End Web Developer. Regardless of the path taken, you will be doing individual projects or working as part of a team collaborating on different projects.
Imagine working on a project and making several changes but later realized that changes made three days ago, or three hundred lines of codes was the correct one. This situation would cause some degree of frustration. Imagine another scenario where you are working on a team project with other developers, working on the same codebase and trying to sort through errors found after syncing the collaborative effort. This is where a tool such as git would be valuable.
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds. Git tracks file changes giving you a peace of mind knowing that a record of what has been done was stored, and you have the option to revert to a specific version of the codebase or state if needed. When it comes to collaboration, git allows changes from multiple people to be merged into one source. Git being a distributed version control system, has a remote repository which is kept on a server and a local repository which can be stored on each developer’s computer. This means that a full copy of the code can be stored on all the developers’ computers.
How to get started with git?
In order to get started the git installer can be downloaded at http://git-scm.com/downloads. The platform is available to all major OS such as Windows, Mac and Linux.
On a windows machine also install Git Bash at gitforwindows.org. This is a Bash emulation that runs similar to git on a UNIX or Linux environment.
The first time git is run we have to specific certain configuration setting such as name, email, default editor and line ending. We can specify this configure settings at three levels: system, global and local.
· System -All users
· Global — All repositories of the current user
· Local — The current repository
Git Configuration
git config — global user.name “John Doe”
git config — global user.email jdoe@gmail.com
Set Visual Studio Code as default editor
git config — global core.editor “code — wait”
Initializing repository
Create a directory
Mkdir projectdev
Move into directory
Cd projectdev
Initialize repository git init
Adding files to staging area of git
This command is used to stage a single file
git add file1.html
This command is use to stage a multiple files
git add file1.html file2.html
This command is used to stage with a pattern
git add *.html
This command is used to stage current directory and all the content in directory
git add .
Committing the files in staging
Use to commit with a one line message
git commit -m “Your message”
Viewing the Status
git status
Skip the staging area
git commit -am “your message”
How to remove files
Remove files from working directory and staging area
git rm file1.html
Remove files from staging area only
git rm — cached file1.html
Renaming or Removing files
git mv file1.html file1.txt
The .gitignore command is used to exclude files from being tracked with. Files such as log files.
.gitignore
Branches
Creates a new branch
git branch
Switches to the specified branch and updates the working tree files
git checkout
Combines the specified branch’s history into the current branch.
git merge
git branch -d
Synchronize Changes
This command is used to download contents from a remote repository
git fetch
Integrate remote tracking branch into current local branch
git merge
Uploads all local branch commits to GitHub
git push
Updates your current local working branch with all new commits from the remote branch on GitHub
git pull
