Head First Git

Chapter 5. Collaborating with Git - Part I: Remote Work

Working by yourself can get dull quickly. So far in this book, we have learned a lot about how Git works, and how to work with Git repositories. The repositories we used are ones that we initialized locally using the git init command. Despite that, we’ve managed to get a lot done—we created branches, merged them, and used Git utilities like the git log and git diff commands to see how our repository evolved over time. But most projects aren’t like that. We often work in teams or with friends or colleagues. Git offers a very powerful collaboration model—one in which we can all share our work using a single repository. It all starts by making our repository “publicly available,” which makes the commit history of the project a “shared” history. In a public repository we can do everything we’ve learned so far, just as we’ve always done (with a few exceptions). We can create branches and commits and add to the commit history, and so can others; everyone can see and add to that history. That’s how we collaborate with Git.

But before we start collaborating, let’s spend some time together to understand how public repositories work and how to get started with them. Go team!

Another way to a Git repository: cloning

In Chapter 1 we talked about the git init command, which converts a folder on your computer into a Git repository. ...