Introduction to Git

Git is a popular, free, open source, and distributed version control system that allows you to make changes to everything from small files to very large projects. Being distributed means you don’t have to rely on a single server: each machine in use has a full copy of the repository along with the version history, so if a server died for some reason, you could restore the code from the copy present on another machine.

Git stores data as a stream of snapshots when you commit a change. If a file is not changed then Git doesn’t store that file again, instead just using the reference to the previous identical file. When committing a changed file, Git basically captures a picture of what all changed files look like at that moment and stores a reference of that snapshot.

The following diagram shows an architectural view of a VCS repository where computers one and two have the same copy of the repository. A developer is working on a copy of the file...