Workshop Overview

Version control is the lab notebook of the digital world: it’s what professionals use to keep track of what they’ve done and to collaborate with others. Every large software development project relies on it, and most programmers use it for their small jobs as well. And it isn’t just for software: books, papers, small data sets, and anything that changes over time or needs to be shared, should be stored in a version control system.

In this session, we’ll learn how to identify old versions of files, practice Rolling Back to recover old versions of files, and learn how version control allows us to undo a set of changes quickly.

Objectives

1. Understand the benefits of an automated version control system & how Git works
2. Set up to use Git
3. Create a local Git repository
4. Record changes in Git and Go through the modify-add-commit cycle for one or more files
5. Learn what the HEAD of a repository is and how to use it
6. Identify and use Git commit numbers
7. Compare various versions of tracked files
8. Restore old versions of files
9. Configure Git to ignore specific files

There are no prerequisites or experience required. In this lesson, we use Git from the Unix Shell and explore GitHub. Some previous experience with the shell is expected but isn’t mandatory.

Bring your laptop.

Please see this section of the workshop template for instructions on installing Git and preparing for the workshop. You will need an account at github.com for parts of the Git lesson. If you’d like help to set up your shell environment, install Git, and set up a user account in Github, please contact cds@nd.edu.

You can take this workshop to build toward the completion of either the Software or Library Carpentries lesson series. This workshop is taught by a Carpentries-certified instructor.