Tutorial 0 Introduction - McGill-ECSE429-Winter2022/tutorials GitHub Wiki

Use this tutorial to get started with Git! Credits to: Marton Bur

Install the Git version control system (VCS) from https://git-scm.com/downloads.

Visit https://github.com/ then click on New repository (green buttom on the right).
Set your user as the owner of the repository.
Give a name for the repository (e.g., ecse429-tutorial-1), leave it public, then check Initialize this repository with a README. Click on Create repository afterwards. At this point the remote repository is ready to use.

Open up a terminal (Git bash on Windows).
Navigate to the designated target directory (it is typical to use the git folder within the home directory for storing Git repositories, e.g., cd /home/username/git).
Using a Git client, clone this repository to your local Git repository. First, get the repository URL (use HTTPS for now).

Then, issue git clone https://url/of/the/repository.git
You should get an output similar to this:
Verify the contents of the working copy of the repository by ls -la ./repo-name. The .git folder holds version information and history for the repository.

Open up a terminal and configure username and email address. These are needed to identify the author of the different changes.

Glossary — Part 1:
- Git is your version control software
- GitHub hosts your repositories
- A repository is a collection of files and their history
- A commit is a saved state of the repository
Enter the working directory, then check the history by issuing git log. Example output:
Adding and commiting a file: use the git add and git commit commands.

The effect of these commands are explained on the figure below:

Glossary — Part 2:
- Working Directory: files being worked on right now
- Staging area: files ready to be committed
- Repository: A collection of commits
Checking current status is done with git status.
Staging and unstaging files: use git reset to remove files from the staging area.

Important: only staged files will be commited.
To display detailed changes in unstaged files use git diff, while use git diff --staged to show changes within files staged for commit.
Reverting to a previous version is done using git checkout.
The commands git pull (or the git fetch + git rebase combination) and git push are used to synchronize local and remote repositories.

You can browse pushed commits in the remote repository online using GitHub. You can select the commits menu for a repository.

To get a link for a specific commit, click on the button with the first few characters of the hash of the commit.

cd: change/navigate directory
ls: list contents of a directory
ls -la: list all contents of a directory in long listing format
touch: create a file
cp: copy a file
mv: move a file
rm: remove a file
mkdir: create a directory
cp -r: copy a directory recursively with its contents
rmdir: remove a directory
rm -rf: force to recursively delete a directory (or file) and all its contents
cat: concatenate and print contents of files
nano: an easy-to-use text editor