GIT Introduction

Git is a powerful open-source distributed version control system that tracks changes in your codebase, ensuring that you can manage and revert changes with ease. In this article, we explore Git's core concepts through a practical example that demonstrates how Git efficiently handles multiple versions of your project.

Imagine you are building a website. After completing most of your work, you deploy the website so that it becomes accessible via your domain. Meanwhile, you also maintain a local version of this deployed website on your computer. Later on, you decide to update the site—perhaps by changing the background image and enhancing the landing page's subtitle. These modifications represent draft changes that are not yet ready for deployment.

At that moment, a friend alerts you to a small but important issue: there is a typo in the navigation bar where the "About" button contains an extra "B". You need to fix this typo on the live website without deploying the unfinished changes involving the background and subtitle.

Git comes to the rescue in such scenarios. Acting as a content tracker, Git not only stores all your code changes but also serves as a distributed version control system. Here’s how Git can make a difference:

1. Version Control: Git allows you to save the current state of your website and revert to any previous state as needed. It maintains a comprehensive history of changes—including details about who made them and when—so you can always track down the origin of issues.
2. Distributed System: With Git, every developer retains a local copy of the complete codebase, in addition to the remote repository hosted on a server. This ensures that the entire history of changes is always available, both locally and remotely.

Using Git, you can easily manage different versions of your website. For example, you can switch to the deployed version to quickly address the typo without disturbing your local draft changes (such as the background image and subtitle modifications). Once the typo is corrected and redeployed, you can resume work on your in-progress updates.

Git grants complete access to your project's history, including details of every change made, the author of each change, and the exact time when it was committed. This capability is especially useful for quickly addressing issues like the button typo while still maintaining the integrity of your work-in-progress branch. If needed, you can revert to the state of the website at the time of deployment without losing any new work, and then seamlessly switch back to continue your updates.

In summary, Git’s version control abilities empower you to effortlessly manage different versions of your codebase by allowing you to revert to previous states and maintain a detailed record of changes. Its distributed architecture ensures that every developer involved in a project always has access to the complete repository, making collaborative work more efficient—even when juggling multiple features at once.