If you are a software developer, you might have heard of Git, or even used it for your projects. But what exactly is Git and why is it so popular? In this blog post, we will try to answer these questions and give you an overview of Git’s main features and benefits.
Git is a distributed version control system (VCS) that allows you to track changes in any set of files, usually source code. A VCS helps you manage different versions of your files, compare them, merge them and undo them if needed. A VCS also enables collaboration among developers working on the same project.
Unlike some other VCSs that rely on a central server to store all the versions of the files, Git is distributed, which means that every developer has a local copy of the entire repository on their machine. This local copy is called a clone and it contains all the history and metadata of the project. This makes Git very fast and efficient, as most operations can be done locally without network access or communication with a server.
Git also supports non-linear workflows, which means that you can create multiple branches of your project and work on them independently. A branch is like a parallel version of your project that diverges from the main line (called master or main) at some point. You can switch between branches easily and merge them back when they are ready. Branching allows you to experiment with new features or bug fixes without affecting the stability of the main branch.
Git was created by Linus Torvalds in 2005 for developing the Linux kernel, one of the largest and most complex open source projects in the world. Since then, Git has become widely adopted by many other projects and companies due to its speed, reliability and flexibility. Some of the most popular platforms that use Git are GitHub , GitLab , Bitbucket , Azure DevOps , etc.
To use Git, you need to install it on your machine and learn some basic commands to interact with it. You can also use graphical user interfaces (GUIs) or integrated development environments (IDEs) that provide more visual tools for working with Git. However, knowing how to use Git from the command line can give you more control and understanding of how it works under the hood.
