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Javi Palacios
Javi Palacios

Posted on • Originally published at fjp.es

Getting started with Git

#devops #git #beginners #tutorial

We already know What is Git and we learned How to Install Git on our Operating System. Now is about time that we learn how to do our first commit with this amazing Version Control Software. :)

From now on, all the commands are valid for UNIX environments, if you are following this course from Windows, then you have three options: Ignore all the commands in this article, except Git commands and doing all other operations graphically; Convert manually the commands we use to the correct ones for Windows cmd.exe or PowerShell, or the very last option but the most recommended: Install Cygwin, it's a UNIX Terminal Emulator and thanks to Cygwin, you can use UNIX commands like if you were using a Linux Terminal without having to worry about wrong commands or special syntax.

$ mkdir git-tutorial
$ cd git-tutorial
$ git init
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With mkdir we are creating a new folder for our project (in this case for this course), with cd we get into the project's folder and with git init we tell Git to start the Version Control on this folder. When we type these commands on UNIX environments we can check everything went OK with a simple command ls -a and we will see there's a hidden folder named .git (On Windows is hidden but Windows-way) and is in this folder where all our files are going to be stored with all the changes we make to them. Let's see what git status says:

On branch master
No commits yet
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
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We will explain what a branch is in future articles. Checking with git status is a good way to check that everything is created and working. We are going to create an HTML file with very basic HTML5 structure/code, if you are not familiar with HTML, don't worry about it now as the content of the file doesn't matter.

$ touch index.html
$ vim index.html
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With touch we create the file and with vim we edit the same. The next code goes into the file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge" />
    <title>Our wonderful Git tutorial</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Getting started with Git</h1>
  </body>
</html>
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And now again, let's see what git status has to say.

On branch master
No commits yet
Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        index.html
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
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If your screen looks similar to this, then everything went normal and if you have a look on the output you will read that Git found new file(s) (The HTML file we created before) but we didn't told Git that we wanted to add this file to the queue for the next commit. We need to add manually the files we want to add to the next commit, easy, just with git add index.html but in case you have more files and let's say you want to add to the queue all the files in the current folder, a simple git add . will add all the files from this folder to the queue. Now let's try again with git status:

On branch master
No commits yet
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
        new file:   index.html
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This is the exciting part, the mega famous commit. A commit for Git means, we are happy with all the changes and files in this folder and they are ready for putting them in the release. *Commit*ting is a must, every change, every bug fix (hope you don't need to commit many of those :P) and every new implementation you do must be reflected with a commit. Why? Basically, because the best feature of a Version Control Software like Git, is the ability to revert to any of these changes in the time line or in other words going back thru all the commits you did, let's say you committed a bug fix that doesn't work as you expected it to work then, with Git, you can just revert everything back as it was before the bug fix commit. For our first commit, all we need to type is git commit -m "Initial commit"

[master (root-commit) 2fdbe1d] Initial commit
 1 file changed, 12 insertions(+)
 create mode 100644 index.html
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And now our huge project is safe. Okay, okay, maybe is not a biiiig project and you just think 'Why I should use a Version Control??' but believe me, even for this small HTML page, we need to think bigger, look at the future and just imagine this small project becoming a 20 file project with around 800 lines per file. You would be thankful to have a way to go back in case your new Payment Gateway Code gets frozen just in the middle of a transaction and the old code was working just perfect.

If you want to understand in depth what we have done so far is necessary to understand the three States of Git, I encourage you to read the article.

Just quick reminder, all the files we create or modify for this course are available in our Git Tutorial Repo and in our Main GitHub.

And Remember… never stop programming!

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