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Revision Control

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The basics

• Version control is a way to track changes across iterations of a file
• Most commonly used in larger projects, where multiple people may have to work on the same files, often simultaneously
• A few of the most popular options are

1. Git(hub)
2. Subversion (SVN)
3. Microsoft Team Foundation

• All of these provide online access to view the repository of files, compare iterations, and create branch projects from your and others’ code

SVN

• Relatively simple to setup a private SVN server, many options available
• While no major OS come with SVN preinstalled, multiple clients and server options exist for most platforms
• Ideal option for secure hosting of non-public projects
• Free and Open Source

Team Foundation

• Microsoft’s version control system and public repositories
• Support for it comes preinstalled in Visual Studio
• Can publicly host projects and compiled binaries for easy distribution

Git(Hub)

• Git is a terminal utility often preinstalled on modern *nix distributions

• GUI options for GitHub, Windows command line and Powershell versions available

• Command line is the only way to access all the capabilities of Git
• GitHub is cloud hosting for Git repositories, it’s also a social network community for developers
• One of the most popular ways to share source code, as well as hosting precompiled binaries
• Provides fairly detailed analytics, like contributions by date

• Every student should visit https://education.github.com/pack to get a bunch of free development tools and services
• All WSU EECS students have a private git repository available at https://git.eecs.wsu.edu/

Getting Started w/ Git

• First time using Git, you may want to set a different editor than vim, you can export GIT_EDITOR=nano as one example to change it temporarily, use git config for permanent changes
• To start a new project repository, navigate to the project directory, and run git init
• To create a working copy of an existing repository, use git clone directory/path or http://repository.url
• The command to add new files to be tracked by the repository is git add * or filename

• This tells your local git client to track a file by adding it to the index, though they aren’t yet added to the repository, you’ll have to submit this pending commits to the HEAD of the local repository with git commit –m “Commit message”
• Finally, to push these changes to the remote repository, you’ll have to run git push origin master or branch or <server>
• Master is the primary branch for the repository, though you can specify a specific branch instead, in the case where there is no remote repository yet, you’ll have to specify the server
• If you’re using Github as your repository, and you’ve already initialized your local repo, you can push it using the following commands

 git remote add origin https://github.com/username/reponame.git
 git push origin master

• To make sure you’re working with the latest files of a repository, use git pull, using checkout will overwrite any local changes not yet added to the index, to revert all changes, the following two commands must be used

• git fetch origin
• git reset –hard origin/master

• Removing an unnecessary file is as easy as git rm fileName

Branches

• Branching is a way to develop components in isolation of each other. The master branch is the primary branch, where as other branches are usually created temporarily, and merged back into the master once completed
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• To switch between branches, use git checkout –b branchName

• Switching back to the master is as easy as git checkout master and to remove a branch, use git branch –d branchName
• Branches are local only, unless you push to an origin other than master

• git merge branchName will attempt to merge a branch with your active branch (or master), conflict resolution will have to be performed by the user, to simply view the changes, use git diff sourceBranch targetBranch

Commit Log and Tagging

• Often you’ll want to tag a commit, the most common example being to giving it a version number

• Before you can tag a commit, you need to know the first 10 characters of the commit id, to do that, you’ll need to read the log

• The log shows a detailed view of all commits, and can be used in multiple ways

• git log is the simplest form
• git log --author=name if you want commits by only a certain user
• git log --pretty=oneline is a compact way to view it for larger files
• git log --graph --oneline --decorate --all
• git log --name-status to view only files that have changes
• check out git log --help for more details on how you can utilize this command

• Once you know the commit id, you can tag it, for example with the version number 1.0.0 like so: git tag 1.0.0 commitID

Simple Assignment

• Go to https://try.github.io/levels/1/challenges/1
• Complete all the short challenges to get a hang of what you’re doing