What Is Version Control?

Quick reference

• 00:05 In this video, we're going to talk about something that pretty important to coding
• 00:08 in general regardless of which programming language you use or
• 00:11 what your trying to build.
• 00:13 Talking about version control.
• 00:15 Now version control is a way to keep track of the changes to your code overtime.
• 00:19 It's also a way to sort of backup your code in case of emergencies.
• 00:22 Why is it important?
• 00:24 Well, I can't tell you how many times I've had perfectly fine code and
• 00:27 then I decided to add an additional feature or add something else.
• 00:31 So I start hacking around on the code and a few hours later, the thing I'm trying to
• 00:35 build is a mess, it doesn't work, the whole thing's been destroyed,
• 00:38 I don't know what happened, I don't know how to fix it.
• 00:41 And it is just an absolute mess, well with version control you can just issue one
• 00:46 command in roll your code back a few hours to when it did work and everything's fine.
• 00:52 So, it's just so very important that you always use version control.
• 00:56 It's also good for teams that are collaborating, it allows you to keep track
• 01:00 of who did what and when and it also allows you to merge your code.
• 01:03 So if you're working on code and your partners working on code and
• 01:06 then you wanna merge those two pieces of code together,
• 01:09 version control will let you do that, just very important.
• 01:12 So there are several popular versions of version control out there some of
• 01:16 the names that are Subversion, Git and Mercurial, those are some of the names
• 01:20 you'll hear. In my opinion Git is the the most popular one.
• 01:23 And so that's what we're gonna be using through out this course,
• 01:26 GIT has been around forever and it's just really easy to use.
• 01:28 So Git is a program, it's G-I-T, Git and
• 01:31 it's sit on your local development environment or your local computer.
• 01:37 In our case, it sits in our C9 development environment.
• 01:40 Like l said this is a Linux server and
• 01:43 most of the time Linux has Git installed on it and this one already has it so,
• 01:46 we don't have to install anything, we just need to turn it on.
• 01:49 The one more thing before we actually start using it,
• 01:52 Git is local, so it resides right here in our local development environment, but
• 01:56 keeping your code just locally is not really a good idea something would happen,
• 02:01 if this server crashed everything disappeared or
• 02:03 code would be gone, that's bad.
• 02:05 So it's always a good idea your stuff and push your code to third party,
• 02:09 in our case we're gonna be using GitHub.
• 02:12 It's also service called BitBucket that's very similar and
• 02:15 I'll talk about, in the next couple of videos, why you'd choose one or the other.
• 02:18 But it's important to designate between the two, there's Git and
• 02:22 there is a GitHub and the two very different things.
• 02:25 Git did all the stuffs locally and then we push the code up to GitHub it's sort of
• 02:29 a repository as a place to backup your code basically.
• 02:33 We will get in all that in the next video and this video, very quickly, we need to setup
• 02:38 Git and turn it on and I'll teach you the basic commands in order to use it.
• 02:43 They're very simple, we just need to type in three or four different commands and
• 02:46 they're sort of long commands, but it's not too bad.
• 02:49 So just follow along here, you might wanna write this down,
• 02:51 'cause you'll always do this every time you develop something online.
• 02:54 These are the same commands you''' use every time, so
• 02:56 it's good to memorize them or at least write them down.
• 02:59 To get started we type in git config --global user.name,
• 03:06 and then type in your name, in quotes, and then hit Enter.
• 03:13 Now we type in git config --global user.email and
• 03:18 type in your email address and it's important to
• 03:23 use this same email address that you plan on using in
• 03:28 the future at GitHub, so that you need to connect.
• 03:33 So the next command is git config --global
• 03:42 push.default matching
• 03:47 And then git config --global alias.co checkout and
• 03:55 that's it, now I need to turn it on and
• 04:00 to be there we type in git init.
• 04:05 And what it's done is,
• 04:06 it's created a repository this period before that means it's a hidden directory.
• 04:11 It's located in the workspace directory which is this pinteresting directory but
• 04:15 doesn't show up here, 'cause like I said it's hidden.
• 04:18 And now we have Git up and running now to use Git type in clear to clear the screen.
• 04:24 Every time we wanna save our code,
• 04:26 we need to issue the couple of commands to do that.
• 04:28 So, let's just do for the first time,
• 04:31 type in git add, then a space and then a period, and
• 04:34 the period means we're gonna save all the files and all the directories on our system.
• 04:39 Hit Enter, now we type git commit -am and we wanna give this a message,
• 04:44 every time you save your code, you wanna give it a little message,
• 04:48 it helps to keep track of changes over time.
• 04:51 You can look at those messages, and sort of get an idea where you are at.
• 04:54 So, for the first one, we are gonna do "Initial Commit" and
• 04:59 what we're doing is committing our code to your repository.
• 05:03 And you can see, re-size this. It's saved all of the files and
• 05:08 everytime you do this, it'll save all the files that you've
• 05:13 change since the last time you made a commit, so go ahead and clear that, and now we're done.
• 05:20 In the next video I'll show you how to push your code up to GitHub.
• 05:23 But for right now, we are ready to go.
• 05:26 We've got version control up and running, we've made our initial commit.
• 05:29 We've saved all our code for the first time and that's all for this video.

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