Learning how to use Git and Github - Part 1

The last time I told you a bit about what is Github and Git. Now, I'm going to explain how you can make a basic use of these tools. Even though we can create repositories in Github, upload files, edit these files, etc. the truly power of repositories and Git can be only achieved using them with a Terminal or a Command Prompt. Yes, a terminal, and it's very easy learning how to use it.

Source

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Requirements

• A Github account
• Having Git installed; this is explained in the next section

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Installing Git

Windows

In order to use Git on Windows, we need to install it first. We can download the Git installer in the following link. We don't need to choose a specific setting during the installation, click on the Next button until the program is installed is enough. After Git is installed, we can check it was successfully installed with the following command in a Command Prompt window: git --version. You should see an output like this:

Linux

Most of the Linux distribution have Git installed by default. We can check we have it installed running the following command in a Terminal: git --version and you should see an output like this:

If by any chance you don't have Git installed, typing sudo apt-get install git in a terminal should be enough to install it.

All the commands I'm going to use in this guide can be used in both Linux and Windows system.

Creating a repository

Even though we are going to be using Git from our computers, our repositories will be stored in Github. So we need to create a New Repository in Github.

Once we have finished filling the basic information (repository name and description), we create the repository by clicking the green button that says Create repository, and we should see some instructions like these ones:

Cloning our repository

Of all the information that appears in the new screen, we only need the one in that says Quick setup. We copy this link and we open a Terminal (or a Windows' Command Prompt), and we execute the following command: git clone <link-we-just-copied>

The git clone command allows us, as its name suggests, clone a repository. This means we are going to download all the repository to our computer. By cloning a repository in our computer, a folder with the repository's name is created.

Everytime we open a Terminal or a Windows' Command Prompt, a default route or location is selected. In Linux this route is /home/<your-user>/ and in the case of Windows that location is C:\Users\<your-user>\. This means that inside these locations we can find the repository's folder we just cloned.

Once the repository is cloned, we need to move inside its folder by typing the command cd <our-repository-name>. In my case it'd be cd steemit-git-tutorial.

Adding files to our repository

To get started, we are going to add a simple file to our repository. In this case, I'm going to create an empty text file and I'm going to save inside the folder that contains our repository, which in my case is steemit-git-tutorial. You can create a new file, or copy an already existing file, this is up to you. Once we have copied the file inside the folder, we can check that it's really in there by executing the command git status. This command shows every file that has been modified in the repository.

As you can see, we've received a message saying that this file is an untracked file, that means that the repository knows it's inside the folder but it doesn't know it should be tracking the changes of this file. So, in order of getting our repository to start tracking the changes in this file, we need to add the file to the repository by typing executing the command git add file1. After executing the command, we type git status again so we can see the difference.

Making our first commit

Once our repository is tracking all our files, everytime we execute the command git status it will tell us which files have been modified. As I told you before, we can use the commits to save all the changes we've made. We just added a new file, so it's time to make a commit and upload it to our repository.

In this case, we only have a single file, but we can add as many files as we need, separating the name and/or location of the files by spaces. Every time we want to make a commit, we need to indicate which files will be included in that commit, and we can do it with the command git add. We just added our new created file, so we don't need to do it again. Now, we execute the command git commit -m "introduce a brief description here". This command allows us to save all the changes we have made in our repository's files we have added with git add. As you can see, we can introduce a brief description within the quotation marks.

By executing this command, the terminal will tell us which files have been modified, and what kind of modification has been made: file deletion, file creation, adding lines or removing lines.

Uploading our changes to Github

Once we commit our changes, we can upload them to Github too. Having our changes in Github allows us to have a remote backup of our project on the server, so we can share them easily and download them in any computer we want. In order to upload our changes to Github, we execute the command: git push origin master. This command receives two arguments: origin is the name that Git gives to our repository, and master is the name of the main branch in our repository (and the only one created, by default). In another post we'll see more details about this.

Now, if we check out Github repository, we can see that in fact our file was uploaded and it shows the description we entered.

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Summary

This might seem like a lot of information to process, but we have only used 4 simple commands, the same ones will be using every time we work with Git. So far we've used:

• git clone <repository>: allows us to clone (download) a repository to our computer. We only use this command when we want to download a new repository to our computer.
• git add <file1> <file2> <file3> ... <filen>: allows us to add new files to our repository, or to our commits. As you can see, we can add several files if we separate them with spaces, for example: git add file1 file2 /src/containers/file3.
• git commit -m "message": allows us to save the changes we've made to our files, also, we can (and we must, it's a good practice) add a descriptive but brief description to the changes we've made. Git won't let us commit our changes if we don't add a description.
• git push origin <branch>: allows us to upload our changes to Github. By default we use the branch master.

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So far, we know how to add files to our repository and how to upload them to Github. In the next part, we are going to keep using these commands we've just learned, and we'll see what happens when we modify the files that are inside our repository and are modified.

If you have any questions, problems with the procedure, or comments about this, leave them in the comments section

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