What is so great about this oddly named tool?

Since its creation, Git has become an immensely popular Distributed Source Control System. It allows you to track changes in your files while simplifying collaborative work on files and projects both for individuals and companies.

People often confuse Git and GitHub, but they are quite different things. Github is a centralized cloud server that allows you to store your code in repositories. It also allows you to interact with other developers on Open Source Projects.

The main focus of this lesson is to not only give you a proper foundation in Git, but also to serve as an inspiration for further learning. By the end of this session, we should be able to push a simple hangman python sketch to github from our computer terminal.

Now that we know a basic concept of Git, lets move on to the next part: Installing Git

Installing Git

Unless you are a windows user, getting git setup on your device is very easy from the command line:

Linux

sudo apt-get install git

Mac

git version

you will get the option to download x code or to just install git, for now, let's just install git. Go ahead and click the install button

Github

• Go to https://github.com and create an account. You may be required to activate your account afterwards. If you already have an account on Github, you may skip this step.
• Next, lets create a repository on Github. A repository is a folder on the cloud in which your project is hosted
• Give your repository a suitable name. python-hangman seems decent enough
• Next, you can provide an optional description

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Git Config

Now that we have an Account on Github lets update our credentials in the command line locally. To do that, we use the git config command for that. We want these configurations to be saved on our computer so that we don't have to set it up everytime we want to use git. So we'll pass it the --global option.

git config --global user.name "yourUserNameHere"

This command will set your username gobally. Next, let's setup our email globally too.

git config --global user.email your@email.com

With that done, let's navigate into our hangman project directory and manage it with git. Click here to download the hangman project file.

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Git doesn't automatically determine which files or projects to manage on your computer. In order to manage your project with git, you need to initialize an instance of git in the project directory. To do that, we'll use the init command.

git init

With git initialized, let's check the status of our project directory. This will tell us about the files in our project directory and their state in relation to git.

git status

Let's add our hangman.py to git locally.

git add hangman.py

Next, we'll record the state of our repository now ("Which in this case is the state of our hangman.py file"). We will add a message to describe the state of our repo or what changes we made. We will use the commit command in git, and give it the message -m option.

git commit -m "added main project file"

Now, let's try to push our repository to Github.

First we need to set our remote. A remote is git's fancy way of saying The Place where your code is stored. Copy the link to the repositor you created on github.

git remote add origin https://github.com/yourUsername/repository.git

With our remote added, we can now push the repository to github.

git push -u origin master

Further Commands in Git

Command	Meaning
git diff	Shows differences that haven't been staged
git reset [filename]	Unstages the file, but preseves it contents
git rm [filename]	Deletes the file from our working directory and removes it from git too. Note: you will have to run git commit afterwards to delete the file
git pull	Downloads all commits that are in your Github repository.