Managing Files with Git

Using Git for project file management

A critical element in doing any API work is managing all the project files. That means being able to track all the changes we make to our files, sharing them in a way that allows others on our team to make their own changes without overwriting ours, and—in case of serious problems— reverse one or more of those changes in order to undo any mistakes that might have been made. This kind of work falls under the category of version control systems (VCS) or source code management (SCM).

Over the years, developers have seen several systems for managing code files. Concurrent Versions System (CVS) was released in 1990 and Perforce came out in 1995. Another product, Apache Subversion (SVN), was first released in 2001 and is still quite common today. Two other systems were released in 2005, Mercurial and Git. Git is a free open-source distributed VCS that can handle both small and large projects. There have been several other systems for managing code files over the years, but so far, Git has been tracked as the most commonly used code management system, according to the article “Version Control Systems Popularity in 2016” from RhodeCode.

For the work we’ll be doing in this course, we need to cover some basic git commands that allow us to create a new Git repository (often called a repo), check the status of the repository, and add and commit any changes to it. We’ll also learn how to check for differences (diff) between the current copy of our files and the ones already in the repository. As a bonus, we’ll learn how to copy an existing repository to a remote location (in our case, the GitHub website), where other people can interact with our project.

Creating our Git repository

The Git system allows us to mark any file folder on disk as a project repository. We can do that by initializing that folder using the init command. The following is an example interactive session where we create a new folder on the disk, use the cd command to change directories and move into our new folder, and then execute Git’s init command to mark it as our project repository:

root@educative:/# mkdir onboarding

root@educative:/# cd onboarding/

root@educative:/onboarding# git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /onboarding/.git/

root@educative:/onboarding#

All Git commands are preceded by the git ...