How Git Works

It's complicated!

How Git Works

Key Concepts: Snapshots

• The way git keeps track of your code history

• Essentially records what all your files look like at a given point in time

• You decide when to take a snapshot, and of what files

• Have the ability to go back to visit any snapshot

• Your snapshots from later on will stay around, too 

How Git Works

Key Concepts: Commit

• The act of creating a snapshot

• Can be a noun or verb

• “I commited code”

• “I just made a new commit”

• Essentially, a project is made up of a bunch of commits

• Commits contain three pieces of information: 1. Information about how the files changed from previously 2. A reference to the commit that came before it

• Called the “parent commit” 3. A hash code name

• Will look something like: f2d2ec5069fc6776c80b3ad6b7cbde3cade4e

How Git Works

Key Concepts: Repositories

• Often shortened to ‘repo’

• A collection of all the files and the history of those files

• Consists of all your commits

• Place where all your hard work is stored 

• Can live on a local machine or on a remote server (GitHub!)

• The act of copying a repository from a remote server is called cloning

• Cloning from a remote server allows teams to work together

• The process of downloading commits that don’t exist on your machine from a remote repository is called pulling changes

• The process of adding your local changes to the remote repository is called pushing changes

How Git Works

Key Concepts: Branches

• All commits in git live on some branch

• But there can be many, many branches

• The main branch in a project is called the master branch