What is Git?

Git is a version control system.

A version control system is a way of keeping track of the history of a file - often a code file - as changes are made over time.

Git allows multiple authors to contribute, suggest changes, and review changes suggested by others - without losing any information along the way.

Git Lifecycle

Information tracked by git moves one step at a time through the git lifecycle from unsaved content to a remote git repository.

The lifecycle flows in the same order each time:

Unsaved ⮕ Staging ⮕ Local Git ⮕ Remote Git

Changes that you have made to a file, and we haven’t told git anything about them.
Once you are happy with the changes, you move this code from the Unsaved bucket to the Staging bucket with git add <your-file-name>

move the contents of the unsaved progress bucket into the staging bucket

We can add as many files as we want to this bucket using git add <file-name>.
Files that are in this bucket together will be grouped when we commit them.
We move files to the local git repository with:
git commit -m “a description of our changes”

move the contents of the staging bucket into the local git bucket

By committing changes, we have added them to the git repository and the history of the file. These changes are now part of the git repository, but only on your computer.
We can push our updated repository to a version stored online with git push.

move the contents of the local git bucket into the remote git bucket

the remote git bucket is ready

Once we have pushed from our local repository to the remote repository, our work is stored online.
This is commonly done through Github.