Git and GitHub

Git is a free, open-source version control software . This basically means that Git is a content tracker. So Git can be used to store content — and it is mostly used to store code because of the other features it provides.

Real life projects generally have multiple developers working in parallel. So they need a version control system like Git to make sure that there are no code conflicts between them.

Also, the requirements in such projects change often. So a version control system allows developers to revert and go back to an older version of their code.

The branch system in Git allows developers to work individually on a task (For example: One branch -> One task OR One branch -> One developer). Basically think of Git as a small software application that controls your code base, if you’re a developer.

If we want to start using Git, we need to know where to host our repositories.

A repository (or “Repo” for short) is a project that contains multiple files. In our case a repository will contain code-based files.

There are two ways you can host your repositories. One is online (on the cloud) and the second is offline (self-installed on your server).

There are three popular Git hosting services: GitHub (owned by Microsoft), GitLab (owned by GitLab) and BitBucket. We’ll use GitHub as our hosting service.