Git for beginners: The definitive practical guide

gitversion control

Ok, after seeing this post by PJ Hyett, I have decided to skip to the end and go with Git.

So what I need is a beginner's practical guide to Git. "Beginner" being defined as someone who knows how to handle their compiler, understands to some level what a Makefile is, and has touched source control without understanding it very well.

"Practical" being defined as this person doesn't want to get into great detail regarding what Git is doing in the background, and doesn't even care (or know) that it's distributed. Your answers might hint at the possibilities, but try to aim for the beginner that wants to keep a 'main' repository on a 'server' which is backed up and secure, and treat their local repository as merely a 'client' resource.

So:

Installation/Setup

Working with the code

Tagging, branching, releases, baselines

Other

  • Describe and link to a good GUI, IDE plugin, etc. that makes Git a non-command line resource, but please list its limitations as well as its good.
    • msysgit – Cross platform, included with Git
    • gitk – Cross platform history viewer, included with Git
    • gitnub – Mac OS X
    • gitx – Mac OS X history viewer
    • smartgit – Cross platform, commercial, beta
    • tig – console GUI for Linux
    • qgit – GUI for Windows, Linux
    • Git Extensions – package for Windows, includes friendly GUI
  • Any other common tasks a beginner should know?
  • How do I work effectively with a subversion repository set as my source control source?

Other Git beginner's references

Delving into Git

I will go through the entries from time to time and 'tidy' them up so they have a consistent look/feel and it's easy to scan the list – feel free to follow a simple "header – brief explanation – list of instructions – gotchas and extra info" template. I'll also link to the entries from the bullet list above so it's easy to find them later.

Best Answer

How do you create a new project/repository?

A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.

This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.

Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.

For example,

cd ~/code/project001/
git init

This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.

To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):

git init project002

(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)

To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"

You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:

$ ls .git
HEAD         config       hooks/       objects/
branches/    description  info/        refs/

If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.

cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/

Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!

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