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This chapter is about getting started with Git. We will begin at the beginning by explaining some background on version control tools, then move on to how to get Git running on your system and finally how to get it set up to start working with. At the end of this chapter you should understand why Git is around, why you should use it, and you should be all set up to do so.

If you can read only one chapter to get going with Git, this is it. This chapter covers every basic command you need to do the vast majority of the things you’ll eventually spend your time doing with Git. By the end of the chapter, you should be able to configure and initialize a repository, begin and stop tracking files, and stage and commit changes. We’ll also show you how to set up Git to ignore certain files and file patterns, how to undo mistakes quickly and easily, how to browse the history of your project and view changes between commits, and how to push and pull from remote repositories.

Nearly every VCS has some form of branching support. Branching means you diverge from the main line of development and continue to do work without messing with that main line. In many VCS tools, this is a somewhat expensive process, often requiring you to create a new copy of your source code directory, which can take a long time for large projects.

At this point, you should be able to do most of the day-to-day tasks for which you’ll be using Git. However, in order to do any collaboration in Git, you’ll need to have a remote Git repository. Although you can technically push changes to and pull changes from individuals' repositories, doing so is discouraged because you can fairly easily confuse what they’re working on if you’re not careful. Furthermore, you want your collaborators to be able to access the repository even if your computer is offline—having a more reliable common repository is often useful. Therefore, the preferred method for collaborating with someone is to set up an intermediate repository that you both have access to, and push to and pull from that.

Now that you have a remote Git repository set up as a point for all the developers to share their code, and you’re familiar with basic Git commands in a local workflow, you’ll look at how to utilize some of the distributed workflows that Git affords you.

GitHub is the single largest host for Git repositories, and is the central point of collaboration for millions of developers and projects. A large percentage of all Git repositories are hosted on GitHub, and many open-source projects use it for Git hosting, issue tracking, code review, and other things. So while it’s not a direct part of the Git open source project, there’s a good chance that you’ll want or need to interact with GitHub at some point while using Git professionally.

By now, you’ve learned most of the day-to-day commands and workflows that you need to manage or maintain a Git repository for your source code control. You’ve accomplished the basic tasks of tracking and committing files, and you’ve harnessed the power of the staging area and lightweight topic branching and merging.

So far, we’ve covered the basics of how Git works and how to use it, and we’ve introduced a number of tools that Git provides to help you use it easily and efficiently. In this chapter, we’ll see how you can make Git operate in a more customized fashion, by introducing several important configuration settings and the hooks system. With these tools, it’s easy to get Git to work exactly the way you, your company, or your group needs it to.

The world isn’t perfect. Usually, you can’t immediately switch every project you come in contact with to Git. Sometimes you’re stuck on a project using another VCS, and wish it was Git. We’ll spend the first part of this chapter learning about ways to use Git as a client when the project you’re working on is hosted in a different system.

You may have skipped to this chapter from a previous chapter, or you may have gotten here after reading the rest of the book—in either case, this is where we’ll go over the inner workings and implementation of Git. We found that learning this information was fundamentally important to understanding how useful and powerful Git is, but others have argued to us that it can be confusing and unnecessarily complex for beginners. Thus, we’ve made this discussion the last chapter in the book so you could read it early or later in your learning process. We leave it up to you to decide.