Working With Git
As we might have mentioned a few times by now, your project folder is a Git repository.
To review, Git is used to track the history of changes in a folder of files, i.e. version control. You can use Git via a variety of interfaces:
- GitHub web interface (or other Git-based hosting platform)
- GitHub Desktop (or other GUI software on your computer)
- Git integrations built into your text editor (such as the “source control” panel on VS Code)
- Git commands entered in your terminal
Under the hood all these methods are interacting with the same version control software and the same history for each repository!
Always keep in mind that with all methods of using Git, the repository is just a folder of files on your computer. You can go into the folder to edit, delete, add, and rearrange just like you would with any other folder on you computer. Only in this case, Git is watching and knows when things have changed!
These are the basic Git terms you will be using:
fetch- download updates to the history from GitHub.pull- download updates from GitHub and update your local repository files.add- stage files with changes that you want to “commit” (this step is sometimes not clear in GUI tools, or called “stage changes”).commit- record a snapshot of the staged changes in your local repository history.push- upload your local history to update GitHub.
Git Resources
Learning Git concepts can be challenging. We know that. All we can say is that it gets easier with repetition (even if it still stumps you sometimes)!
These docs don’t provide a full Git and GitHub tutorial, but we do try to cover enough to make sense of getting started with a CollectionBuilder project. The next page of the docs provides an example walk through for creating your first commits–you will be repeating this process over and over when setting up your site, hopefully reinforcing the basics.
We encourage you to learn more! Check out these resources:
- GitHub Guides, see Hello World for an introduction.
- GitHub Skills for in depth lessons.