As a company grows, they hire more software engineers, and a lot of engineers will work on one project.
You will be able to ask others for code review, show your projects at a job interview or if you are good enough and you have created a cool service, other people might ask to join your project and help you build it!Īlso, when you get your first job, it is 99% likely that you will face git storage in your company. You will be a part of the larger tech community. Publishing your code in open source creates a social effect. Moreover a lot of people who don’t even know each other, will work together collaboratively on those projects as joint contributors. You will discover a big world called open source, where multinational companies or single enthusiasts create valuable projects and share code with other people. When you start programming you can just keep everything on your local machine and learn, but once you develop a project that you would like to share with the community then you have to become more efficient. Well, if you found this post, you’ve probably already decided that you can’t move forward without implementing a git service in workflow. Members of DevOps teams can then access the repositories. A repository is required to store all these versions of code and their commits. This keeps a visual record of all that’s happened to the code during its development. Git tracks changes in code by creating a commit every time the source code is changed.
Git is free and open source, and it requires repositories to store code and information about the development of that code. Git enables programmers to keep track of changes to their code and to collaborate with teams or other individuals. It costs $14.99, but it’s worth every penny to ensure your code is managed correctly and keeps you out of the Terminal.Linus Torvalds, the creator of the open source Linux operating system also created the concept of git which is a distributed version control system. It’s a very simple app that organizes your Git repositories, see all your changes and easily commit files and push to a remote hosted environment.įor more information on GitBox checkout their website. This works fairly well until you start using sub-projects.
You can even use Git within XCode since it has it’s own Source Control built in (File > Source Control). There are a couple good applications that allow you to manage your Git repository using a GUI. When I first started using Git I only used the command line as described in the Git Book above. I’ve been using it for all of my independent apps and it is fantastic! GitBox If you are an independent developer you will probably want to use BitBucket, it’s completely FREE and you can setup as many repositories as you need. GitHub is not free and requires you to pay for the number of code repositories you have. If you work for a company, more often than not they will have an account where all of the code for their apps is kept. The most popular hosted environment is called GitHub. Also since it’s hosted remotely it’s safe from your computer hard drive crashing and losing all your code that you worked on for all those hours. Yet the advantage of having your code hosted allows you to work on it in different locations.
Git can be run locally on your computer, you don’t need to have a hosted environment for it to work. Once you have Git installed, follow the instructions here to create your first repository: Git Basics – Getting a Git Repository Hosted Environment It’s a great book on learning the basics and best of all it’s FREE as well. To learn all about Git and it’s commands, read the Git Book.
The easiest way to get started on a Mac is to download the install here (again it’s FREE). It allows multiple people to work on the same codebase and check-in a different times, usually automatically merging the code together. Git is most important when you are working in teams. If you want to go back in time and review a method that you deleted or changed you can do that. If you accidentally delete a file you can bring it back with Git. Once you add Git to the directory of your project, then all of your files (including code, images, scripts and even the project settings) are saved and every change or keystroke is recorded, allowing you to revert back anytime. Git is free software that allows you to take a snapshot of your codebase at anytime.
When my apps started getting bigger and more complex I started to understand the value of true version control software. This would ensure that I could go back to a previous version of working code if I messed up the current feature I was working on. I did have my own backup method that consisted of me copying my current code to another directory then add a version number to the end with a short description. When I first started making apps I didn’t care about version control software.