Brief introduction to version control with Git

Dr. Maximilian Hindermann

RISE and UB

February 17, 2023

This section’s goal

'An expressive oil painting of a programmer failing to use Git' by Maximilian Hindermann and DALLE-2

Get you in a position to decide if Git might be useful for your work.

Git is a distributed version control system (VCS).
A VCS is “a system that records changes to a file or set of files over time so that specific versions can be recalled later” (Chacon & Straub 2014: 10).
Git is very well suited for text-like data such as code, but of course also for text-like data such as:
- an ALTO-XML file encoding the transcript of a medieval manuscript
- a CSV file recording numerical weather data for Basel
- a JSON-LD file containing a Tropy database
- an SVG file of a research project’s fancy new logo
- a TXT file containing a novel from Project Gutenberg
Git is less well suited for binary data such as audio data, images or video (changes in these files are opaque), especially if these files are large (>100MB); use Git Large File Storage extensionin such cases.

Solves the problem of how to work on the same files together on different computers.

Snapshots of Git used in a command line and an IDE

After installation on your computer, you can use Git:

But where do I host my Git repository? Do I have to configure a server myself?

No. In practice, most users rely on a commercial Git repository hosting service such as GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, or others.
Git repository hosting services do not replace but extend Git!