Version Control with Git

Quick reference

• 00:04 We have one more basic intermediate thing to talk about, and
• 00:08 that is discuss version control.
• 00:10 And version control is a way to save your code in steps as you go forward.
• 00:15 That's really important, because if you mess something up, you need to be able to
• 00:19 roll your code back to a time when it wasn't messed up in order to fix it.
• 00:23 Also, if you're working with other developers and you're collaborating and
• 00:26 you're all writing code, you need some sort of system that keeps track of who
• 00:30 wrote what code and when and then merges all the code together correctly.
• 00:34 In the web development world,
• 00:35 the most popular type of version control is called Git.
• 00:39 And Git is already installed in our development environment here.
• 00:42 We just need to turn it on and start using it.
• 00:44 Now before we do that, there's two steps to Git.
• 00:47 There's Git and then theirs GitHub.
• 00:49 And GitHub is a website.
• 00:51 If you go to GitHub.com and it's a place where you can push your code and
• 00:55 save it in the cloud.
• 00:56 And that's important because something could happen to this Cloud9 website.
• 01:00 It could crash.
• 01:01 It could get hit by hackers.
• 01:03 You could accidentally delete your code here and it would be gone forever.
• 01:06 So it's always a good idea to back up your code somewhere else.
• 01:09 And GitHub is the place where were going to do this.
• 01:11 It's where a ton of people, I mean, most developers use GitHub.
• 01:15 So the first step is to set up Git.
• 01:18 Like I said, it's already installed on here, but
• 01:19 we need to sort of initialize it and turn it on and set some configuration stuff.
• 01:24 But you'll need to download a little terminal tool
• 01:27 to do these things on Windows.
• 01:29 Now if you're on Mac or Linux, you already have a terminal.
• 01:31 Just go to the little search function on your computer and search for
• 01:34 terminal and use that.
• 01:37 But if you're on Windows, head over to Google and type in git bash, and
• 01:42 you see this website, it is git-scm.com/downloads.
• 01:46 And this is the git bash terminal.
• 01:48 It's a free little terminal that we can use, and it's really cool and easy.
• 01:51 So we're on version 2.22.0.
• 01:54 If that changes by the time you watch this video, no big deal,
• 01:56 just download the latest version.
• 01:58 So go ahead and click Download, and we can save this anywhere.
• 02:02 I'm just going to save it to our Desktop.
• 02:04 It takes a little bit to download, it's only 44 megabytes but
• 02:07 this website is really slow.
• 02:09 So once it finishes downloading, go ahead and click it to install it.
• 02:12 And just click the Next button.
• 02:14 And there's a whole bunch of stuff here, we're just going to click Next for
• 02:17 everything.
• 02:18 We don't want to change any of these settings, just take the defaults for
• 02:21 all of them.
• 02:25 Next, Next, Next, Next.
• 02:28 And then finally, click this Install button.
• 02:29 I'm not going to do it because I've already installed it on my computer.
• 02:31 But you go ahead and click it to finish the installation.
• 02:34 Once it's finished, head over to your Windows Start Menu and
• 02:39 type in git bash, G-I-T B-A-S-H.
• 02:42 And when you do, this will appear.
• 02:44 So the first thing we need to do is navigate into
• 02:47 the folder that is holding all of our HTML file.
• 02:50 Type in cd, stands for change directory, and then c and then basic-html.
• 02:57 That's the folder we've been using.
• 02:58 And so we can see we're in this directory right there.
• 03:01 Now I'm going to go ahead and clear the screen.
• 03:03 Now, in order to initialize Git, in order to set it up for the first time,
• 03:07 we have to type in four or five commands.
• 03:10 So the commands are git config --global,
• 03:16 User.name and then quotation marks, and then type in your name.
• 03:21 Git needs to keep track of who does what to the code, so
• 03:24 it needs your name to do that.
• 03:25 The next one is git config --global user.email and
• 03:31 type in your email address.
• 03:37 Now, in the next video, we're going to push all of our code up to GitHub.
• 03:40 So you want to use the same email address that you plan to use at github.com.
• 03:46 Next we type in git config --global
• 03:52 push.default matching.
• 03:58 Then git config --global Alias.co check out,
• 04:05 and then finally get a init.
• 04:09 This turns it on.
• 04:10 Now, I don't remember what any of these commands are.
• 04:13 I've been using the same commands for decades.
• 04:16 This is just the thing you have to do the first time in order to set up Git,
• 04:20 like I said just one time.
• 04:22 And you can see now it says master right here.
• 04:25 And master stands for the master branch.
• 04:28 With Git version control,
• 04:29 you're saving copies of your code to the master branch, right?
• 04:34 So think of a tree that has branches.
• 04:37 If you want to make changes in the future,
• 04:38 you can branch off from your master branch and do other things.
• 04:41 We're not going to get into all that in this video, but that's what that means.
• 04:45 So we can go ahead and and type clear to close the screen.
• 04:48 And like I said, if it says master here, you you've done everything correctly.
• 04:51 So now we need to save our code to Git.
• 04:54 And anytime we want to save our code, we just type in git add period.
• 04:59 And the period stands for everything.
• 05:01 It's going to add everything in this basic HTML directory to our Git repository.
• 05:08 And then we type in git commit -am.
• 05:11 We want to commit the changes to our code.
• 05:13 And now we want to write a little message.
• 05:15 And I'm just going to type in initial commit.
• 05:20 This is our first commit, the initial commit.
• 05:23 Anytime you make major changes to your code and you want to save it,
• 05:26 write a little descriptive message right there.
• 05:29 So if you've created an about page,
• 05:31 I would type in 'created an about page' as this message right here.
• 05:36 So again, just sort of be descriptive.
• 05:40 And boom, we're done, so that's Git.
• 05:42 In the next video,
• 05:43 we'll look at github.com to push all of our code up to github.com for safekeeping.
• 05:49 And we'll talk about why that's important.
• 05:50 And that'll be in the next video.

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