Git intro

# About Git

Git is a distributed version control system. It's quite popular to work with text files — hence in software development. It's fast, assures data integrity and supports non-linear workflows (branching). Git was developed by Linux kernel developers (including Linus Torvalds). It's free and can be used either from the command line or via graphical user interfaces.

Git can help you to collaborate on code projects, keep track of your code changes and rollback to points in time, if needed. It comes with:

• A history of all files included, so you can review or undo changes
• Powerful file merging which makes collaboration easy

To deploy code to fortrabbit you use Git from your local machine and push to the remote on GitHub. So it should be part of your local development setup.

# Learn Git

You should be familiar with Git standard operations and concepts — these are: commit, push and pull. If you don't know Git, yet, we recommend to go ahead and learn the basics. You will profit from it either way — whether you keep using fortrabbit or not. It's a cornerstone of todays software development. For developers not used to the shell it might not be very intuitive to start with, but once you got started it soon becomes very, very handy for all kinds of things besides deploying to fortrabbit. There are many good tutorials out there in the interwebs to get started. For example:

• GitHub: Quickstart
• Official docs from Git SCM
• Try Git in your browser for free
• Guides & ebook from Git Tower
• Get Git right from Atlassian
• and many more

# Install Git

To use Git, you need to have it installed on your local machine. You might already have Git: open a terminal window and type git --version. Good news for macOS and Linux users: you most likely already have it installed.

# Git on Windows

You can work it out. The primary problem you have to solve is: which Git distribution are you going to use. There are multiple of those floating around, we recommend to download and install Git from the official Git website. This one comes with the "Git Bash".

# The hidden .git folder

Git never forgets. It can bring back any content from any file, even deleted ones. To do so, it stores all the stuff in the hidden .git folder at the top level of the repo. Over time that file can get big too. It can also contain unreachable blobs and other stuff you are not aware of. Depending on the situation, there are many ways to clean this up: delete files of a certain type, delete the history before a certain date, or even start again from the current state.

# Git desktop GUIs

Most people probably use Git from the command line (aka bash, terminal, shell). But there are also GUIs (desktop Apps) to manage Git. Those help to get started and to see visually what's going on:

• Git Desktop GUIs list

# About GitHub

You hopefully already know that GitHub is the most popular choice for versionized code hosting and collaborating. It is free to use with private and public projects. Similar alternatives are Bitbucket and GitLab (and Gitee if you are from China). They basically work the same, so most concepts of this guide apply as well.

Sometimes people confuse Git with GitHub. Git is the version control system established by Linus Torvalds. GitHub is the service, which offers Git remote hosting and additional extra magic collaboration features. GitHub has extended Git workflows with neat communication tools around the basic Git usage. Most notable is the "pull request" workflow.

# Large Git repos

A bloated Git repository slows down deployment. You might even hit limits. In most cases the repo can and should be small.

# Large files in Git

You should not put big binary files (> 2 MB) into your Git repo.

In general we also advise not to put assets and most importantly images or even videos in Git. Some images that belong to your website layout, like your company logo (a small SVG) are ok. But when you have a lot of images in Git, odds are that this is bad practice.

For almost all cases, your uploaded content images (.jpg, .png, .gif) do not belong in Git. Remember that the Git repo and the web-space are different things here at fortrabbit, Git is a one-way street here. The next user upload will not be in Git anyways. It's a good practice to separate code from content for many reasons. So we advise to deploy user uploads, static assets and other runtime data separate from the core code deployment done with Git.