This is just a quick guide for those on windows using Visual Studio and wanting to start tinkering with GIT. If you want to know why Git is better than (Insert source control management system here), click this link. Or, if you more in the mood to hear why every other source control system in the world sucks, check out this video from Linus Torvalds who wrote GIT.
First, Git is new as of a few years ago and so the tooling support isn’t phenomenal. That being said, you need to start with by installing msysgit:
Obviously, windows version, download, install, all that good stuff. At this point, you could start using Git as this will install the windows command line tools to do so. However, a command line doesn’t completely cut it for me, and if your reading this, your probably not interested in what I’m writing anyways, so why are you here?
Moving on.
Now that the Git command line tools are installed, You’ll want to install GitExtentions, available here:
This will install tooling support into Visual Studio and also install windows explorer shell extensions and puts a few things into the explorer. Once you run it, you’ll quickly notice that your probably missing a diff tool. You can either install KDiff3 or your own diffing tool. Your preference. If you also don’t have a good text editor (Notepad doesn’t count) I recommend also getting Notepad++ and installing that as well.
Go into settings, and setup your settings to look something like this:
You now have GIT installed. Congratulations!
Now what?
Git 101.
Ok, I’m going to assume you’ve already had some experience with a source control management system of some kind or another (svn, tfs, etc…) before I jump into this. First, everything is local. When you start adding other people or services like GitHub, you realize that your local repository is a branch, and merging involves pulling in changes from other branches, but I digress.
Lets start off with a simple hello world project. Go into visual studio, create a new console project, give it a directory and start it up. Now, to create the repository find this little bar and click on the little folder icon that says ‘browse repository’. (Alternatively, you can simply directly select ‘Create new repository’ from the Git menu in visual studio)
Which will open this:
,From here, select create new repository, if you allowed Visual Studio to create a directory for your project you’ll want to create the repository one directory down since every file in that directory and any sub directory (besides any listed in the .gitignore file) will be source controlled.
On the next page, I recommend clicking on ‘Edit .gitignore’ and copy the recommended list (this will cause git to ignore any files or directories that match this list).
You now have a repository, well on your way to rocking a Git controlled project. Finally, committing files. So go in make your project spit out hello world to the console, and hit commit. You’ll have the following window:
Select all the files in the Working Directory window, click stage, enter a commit message, hit commit, ok, and done! You’ve now made your first commit.
Now, this is something I didn’t understand right off the bat, when you open up this window everything that is different is listed in the working directory changes window, anything that has changed or is different from the previous version that isn’t in the .gitignore file. Now, to commit something, you ‘stage it’ which takes the current version of whatever file you select and puts it in the staging area (this allows you to make sure your only committing what you want to commit, because there’s many cases where you want to break up your commits into subsets of the entire change list) and commit will only commit those files that are in the staging area. If you go back to the ‘browse repository’ you’ll see something like this (I’ve added several commits):
There’s a lot more I could get into, and I may at some point, but this ought to get you on your way, feel free to leave questions in the comments, tell me where something in this post is wrong or outdated and so on.
Happy Git’ing