Before We Start

• Create an account at github.com
• Open up a terminal

What Does It Do?

• Tracks changes to files
• Any file can be tracked
• Text (.txt, .csv, .py, .c, .R, etc.) works best
  • These allow smart diff / merge etc.

Why Use Version Control?

Why Use Version Control?

• Teamwork

Version Control Tracks Changes

Version Control Tracks Changes

Version Control Tracks Changes

Version Control Alternatives

• Git
  • Distributed
• Subversion (svn)
  • Centralised
• Mercurial (hg)
  • Distributed
• Git most widely used in academia
  • GitHub
  • GitLab

Graphical Version Control

Sourcetree	Git Kraken	Git Desktop

GUIs

PyCharm	RStudio	VS Code

Key Commands

• git config

Setting Up GitHub

• Sign up to GitHub: https://github.com/signup
• Open a terminal
• ssh-keygen -t ed25519
• cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
• Copy the contents to GitHub: https://github.com/settings/ssh/new

GitHub Template

• Go to https://github.com/Southampton-RSG-Training/git-novice-template
• “Use This Template”
• Name it climate-analysis

Downloading a Repository

• git clone git@github.com:yourname/climate-analysis

Key Commands

• git add
• git commit

Adding & Committing

History

• git log
• git diff

Differences

More Differences

Restoring Files

• git checkout

Restoring Files

Local Repo

Remote Backups

Collaboration

Remote Repositories

• git push
• git pull

Remote Commands

Feature-branch

Creating branches

• git branch dev
• git checkout dev

Branch files

• Create rainfall_conversion.py
• git add rainfall_conversion.py
• git commit -m

Pushing & merging

• git push origin dev
• git switch main
• git merge dev

Key Files

• .gitignore
• .gitkeep