GIT 101
Posted by Age Mooy in the wee hours: January 26th, 2009
After hearing a lot about distributed source code management (SCM) systems lately, I've been playing around with GIT and I like it a lot. As a longtime user of traditional SCMs like CVS and Subversion, working with GIT is something of a revelation and so nothing seems more natural than spreading the gospel a little 
To help other people learn about GIT, I've collected some of the most interesting GIT 101 stuff I've found around the net.
The Basics
- The GIT homepage: a good place to start. The documentation page has all the starting points you need.
- The official GIT tutorial
- The GIT User Manual: a very exhaustive guide to everything you'll ever need to know about GIT
- GIT Merging By Example: shows the awesome power of GIT merging in action.
GIT vs Subversion
- The GIT-SVN crash course: a good starting point for people switching to GIT from SVN
- A git-svn Tutorial: a good tutorial for using git locally while still working with a central SVN repository.
- Why GIT Is Better Than X: a good summary of arguments why GIT is better than any other SCM and also a good introduction to some of the most basic features of GIT
- Three reasons to switch to GIt from Subversion
Screencasts
- Linus Torvalds on GIT: the creator of GIT explains it all... including his opinion of SVN users.
- GitCasts: a great and growing collection of screencasts on GIT basics. This also includes a presentation on GIT internals that the author gave at RailsConf 2008.
- Grails and GIT Quickcast: a cool screencast that shows how GIT integrates very well with Grails development.
- Egit: The GIT eclipse plugin. Still in its early stages but pretty useful already. If you'd rather use another IDE, Idea IntelliJ 8.1 has GIT integration, Netbeans support has just started, and of course there's always Emacs.
- GitX: An Max OSX version of the built-in Gitk tool. Same functionality, much better looking.
And finally, the GitHub (awesome !) Guides section contains a lot more information and enough starting points to keep you reading and watching screencasts for hours.
Hopefully this will help get you started with GIT. Please leave a comment when you've found other interesting GIT resources.
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Hi Age,
Good collection.
Does free and commerical continuous integration servers supports GIT ? Like how Bamboo listens to SVN/CVS ?
Cheers
Balaji
Good point. I did a quick check and GIT support is not very widespread yet.
For Bamboo there’s an open Jira issue and some guys built their own bamboo plugin but no official support yet. TeamCity also does not have GIt support, although they do support Mercurial, a GIT competitor.
The only CI server with current GIT support that I could find with some quick browsing was Hudson.
I expect that this gap will not exist for very long but it is currently an issue to watch out for.
There is a point that make git usable almost anywhere: git-svn support – and it’s really good.
The distant repository is a classic SVN repos, so you have access to all the common svn integration (CI, sventon, etc).
But on local post, you have a real git repos. I think it’s a pretty cool mid-solution : the reference repository is a SVN, but you and your team use git. Everybody is happy, developers who are able to test and braodly refactor local sources with a real source management (and git full project diff is so nice), admins that only have to know svn configuration, managers that can see cool graph and report from CI (and who make so much time to understand turtoiseSVN, you can’t make them learn a new thing), etc.
So : git-svn if for you.
I might also mention this 101ish article: http://www.newartisans.com/blog_files/git.from.bottom.up.php
Thanks, that’s a really nice article !
git isn’t written in all caps.
Peepcode has a good GIT Screencast as well.
I don’t think it’s an either-or situation. I wrote GIT instead of git to signify it as a name and to give it some extra stress.
it is.
all caps is wrong and it’s annoying to look at.
You have my sincerest apologies. I have learned my lesson and I will from this day on better my life and use “git” instead of “GIT”. Seriously. Thank you.
Thanks for the links Age!
I thought it was a lot of work to set up repositories etc., but within a few minutes I have everything running. Bye bye SVN! (or is that also with lower case?)
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