Git Crash Course #1 - Introduction & Setup

Key Takeaways

Okay then my friends. So I've just released a big Git and GitHub masterclass course on the net.dev site and I wanted to release a free preview of that. So I've packaged up the first two and a half chapters and I'm going to release those as a Git crash course here on YouTube for free. And then if you like the course and you want to take it further, learn more about Git and GitHub and other things as well like incorporating AI with Git and GitHub then feel free to go and grab the full course on the netinja.dev site. The link to that course is going to be down below the video and you can use a promo code which is get 40 to get 40% off the $10 price. Otherwise, my friends, I really hope you enjoy this crash course. [Music] All right, then gang. Welcome to this complete Git and GitHub masterass which I've been planning for a little while now and I've eventually got around to making. And I know what some of you might be thinking. Do I really need to learn Git and GitHub? can't just get on with coding without all this extra stuff on the side. And trust me, I do get it because I used to think exactly the same thing. So before we dive into any of the technical bits about Git, I want to tell you a little story about my very early coding days and why learning version control is going to save you from some proper headaches down the line. So about 15 years ago, I just started out as a freelance web developer making websites for small clients like cafes, window cleaners, musicians, that kind of thing. And at the time, I considered myself to be a fairly competent coder. But I'd never heard of version control or git or any of that stuff. And one particular client I was working for was incredibly picky. And some might go as far as to say he was a pain in the ass. But he wanted round after round of changes and then more changes and then he wanted to go back to previous revisions I made. So every time I made changes to the project or added some new feature that he wanted, I'd save a completely new copy of the entire project to my computer. And my folder structure looks something like this. Project V1, project V2, V3, V4, V5, and so on until eventually when I thought I was done, maybe I would have something like project final. But of course, the client wanted one more tiny change. So then I had Project Final 2 and then Project Final Final and then Project Actual Final and my personal favorite, Project Final for Reals on Wheels. And at one point I must have had about 20 different versions of the same project scattered across my hard drive. And the worst part was I could never remember which version had which changes. So I would spend ages opening different folders trying to figure out which one actually had the navbar fix or the contact form that worked properly, etc. It was like playing some kind of twisted game of hide-and-seek with my own code and that was not fun at all. Now, fast forward a few months and I discovered this tool called Git from a video on a learning website. And I'm thinking at the time, what the hell is Git? It sounds like some kind of insult I'd throw at someone. But this video explains that Git is actually something called a version control system. And basically that means it's like having a magical time machine for your code. Well, almost anyway. So that instead of making 20 different project folders for my different revisions, I can just keep one project folder and then Git keeps track of every single change that you make in that folder. So in really simple terms, if you want to go back to how your navbar looked 3 weeks ago, you can just tell Git to show you that old revision. No more digging through folders with ridiculous names. And Git doesn't just remember what changed. It remembers exactly what changed, when it changed, and why you changed it. because every time you save a new revision called a commit, you write a little message explaining what you did. So instead of trying to remember which folder had the working contact form, you can just look through your commit history and find the one that says fix contact form validation or something. And the best part is that your project folder stays nice and clean with just the current version of your files. All the history and previous versions are tucked away safely by Git, but you can access them whenever you need them. So it really is like a time machine for your code. But that's just the beginning because there's also much more to Git than just making commits. With Git, you can also work on new features in your project in isolation using something called branches which like the name suggests branch away from your main code. And then when you're happy with that feature, you can merge the branch back into your main codebase. So that's really useful if you completely mess the feature up because then you can just delete the branch without ever affecting your main code. There's also something called GitHub, which is like online multiplayer mode for coding projects where you can share a central code base with colleagues and friends. And then you can all work on the project together, adding new features without stepping on each other's toes. And on top of that, you can also review each other's code additions, flag any issues with the project, and assign each other tasks or bugs to work on. It basically turns coding into a form of social activity. And you can invite anyone from around the world into your project so they can contribute to it. But it's not just for personal projects. Pretty much every serious development company or department within a company uses Git and GitHub. So if you want to work as a web developer in any of these companies, then you're probably going to need to be comfortable with these tools. It's not just a nice skill to have anymore. It's a fundamental one like knowing how to use a browser. And a lot of the time it's just expected from companies. And I think now in the age of AI powered coding agents, it's going to be more important than ever because if you're not writing some of the code yourself and you can't be certain of the results, then you're entering into a world of pain if you're not using Git or some form of version control. So learning Git and GitHub isn't just about making your own coding life easier, though it definitely will do. It's about being able to join any development team and actually contribute on day one. Now, if you're anything like I was at all, you'll be thinking, "This all sounds rather complicated." And it would be much simpler to put your fingers in your ears and just carry on without kit. And I'm not going to lie to you, there are parts of using Git and GitHub which can be a little bit complicated when you first start out. But we're going to take this step by step. And I promise you, it's not as scary as you might think it will be. And once you get the hang of it, it becomes second nature and you won't be able to imagine how you ever coded without it. So in this course, we're going to start with the absolute basics and gradually build up your confidence. First, we're going to get everything installed and set up properly on your computer. Then we'll learn the core Git concepts with simple practical examples. We're going to master branching and merging, which is where Git really starts to shine. And then after that, we'll dive into GitHub and learn how to collaborate with other developers. At the end, we'll even look at some of the newer AI powered tools that can make your Git workflow even smoother. And throughout all of this, we'll be working on a couple of dummy projects that I've created, which fittingly I've uploaded to GitHub. So, I'll show you how to access and download those later. And also, don't worry if you're not comfortable with the command line yet. We'll be covering all the essentials you need to know. Plus, I'm going to be showing you some visual tools that can make life easier while you're learning. The goal is to get you confident and competent with Git and GitHub, not to make you feel overwhelmed. and we're going to start in the next lesson by installing Git and making sure you've got all the tools you need to follow along. All right, then. So, now you're hopefully convinced about why Git is going to change your coding life for the better. Let's actually get it installed and set up on our computer. So, first we're going to install Git on whatever operating system you're using, Windows, Mac, or Linux. Then, we're going to configure Git with your personal details so it knows who's making all these commits with it. And finally, we'll test everything to make sure it's all working correctly. Right. So, let's start with installing Git itself. And the installation process is going to be slightly different depending on whether you're on Windows, Mac, or Linux. But either way, the first thing you want to do is head over to gitcm.com. That's the official Git website. And right on the homepage, you're going to see a big download button that should automatically detect your operating system. If you're on Windows, then it's going to say Windows. You're going to get the Windows installer and download that. This is actually a really nice package for Windows that includes not just git but also something called git bash. And bash is a shell which gives you a Unix like command line experience on Windows. Again, lots of terminology here. Don't get bogged down by that all right now. We're going to talk about terminals and shells later. Anyway, download the Windows installer if you're on Windows and then run it. Okay, so once you open that, it's going to start up the installer. We can click on next to go to the next screen. And for most of these screens, by the way, we're just going to accept the default options because they will do. Now, some of those default options are right here. And this first one is to add Windows Explorer integration. And what that means is we can use these two tools from the desktop or in any folder by right-clicking and choosing to open Git Bash or open the Git Goo guy right here. So, we'll learn more about that later on, but keep those selected for now. We're going to go to the next screen. Now, this is one which I would suggest changing because I actually think the default is normally Vim, which is up here. And that can be a little bit off-putting to new Git users and new web developers. I would advise changing that to either Notepad++ if you have it or just generally Notepad down here, or Visual Studio Code, which is what I've got. Then click on next. And we've got two options here for the initial branch for new repos. Now, we don't know what branches are yet or even what a repository is yet. So, I don't want to go into too much depth, but a lot of the time few years ago, we would choose master to be the main branch, the initial branch for new repositories. But these days, most companies and most developers use main. So, I would suggest selecting this option and naming the default branch main. Going to click on next. And then right here, we can adjust your path environment. So this option that is selected in the middle is the recommended one and that adds some git wrappers to your path variable and that means you can use git from within the command prompt or Windows PowerShell etc. We're going to be using git bash when we use a dedicated terminal but I would recommend choosing this option right here. Then you can go to next. We're going to keep most of the rest as their defaults. So just look at my options. Choose the same ones and keep on clicking next. We're going to use minty. That's a terminal. We'll see that later. Uh, fast forward merge. Yep. We're going to click on next. Just click on install at the end. And that's going to install Git now on Windows for you. Now, if you're on a Mac, you've got a few options. The easiest is probably to install Git using Homebrew, which is a package manager for Mac. So, if you've got Homebrew installed, you can just run brew install git in your terminal. Now, if you've not got homebrew installed, you can just go to brew.sh sh and follow the installation instructions. Or you can download the installer from the git website just like we did for Windows. Now, some Macs also come with Git pre-installed, but it might not be the latest version. So, you can update it this way, too. And if you're on Linux, well, you probably already know how to install packages on your system if you're using Linux, but depending on your distribution, you'll install it any of these different ways. The key thing is to make sure you're getting a reasonably recent version. And you can find out your current installation version by opening a terminal and just typing in git version and hitting enter. Now, if you're on Windows, you could use the standard Windows terminal if you added git to the path variable during installation, but I would recommend using git bash for this course, which is a shell that gets installed along with git automatically. And bash allows us to run git commands as well as the same Unix style commands that we can run on a Mac. So to use git bash you can right click anywhere on your desktop or in a folder and then you can go down to show more options and click on that and then choose the option open git bash here. So that's going to open a terminal looking like this or it might not look like this. It might look a little bit different. I've customized this but we can now run git commands in here because this is running the bash shell. Now on a Mac you can just use your regular terminal which does allow you to run git and Unix commands inside it. But anyway now just type git version all lowercase hit enter and you should see the version right here installed on your computer. Now since we're talking about terminals and shells and some other jargon as well I just wanted to take a quick aside to explain what those things are because I know it can be confusing at first. So a terminal is just the window we use to type commands into and a shell is the program running inside the terminal that actually reads and executes those commands. For example, on Windows 11, the terminal is called Windows Terminal and the default shell running inside it is PowerShell. On a Mac, the terminal is just called Terminal and the default shell inside it these days is Zshell. Now, when I opened Git Bash a moment ago, the terminal it used was called Minty, and the shell inside it was bash. And bash stands for Born again shell. Now, the reason I'm using Bash instead of PowerShell is because Bash allows us to run Unix style commands and get commands out of the box, just like Zshell does on a Mac, but PowerShell doesn't, and we'd have to go through some extra setup to use all the same commands. So, if you're using Windows Terminal with PowerShell, some of the commands I use in this lesson might not work out of the box for you. And that's why I recommend using Git Bash for this course. Okay, so once you've got Git installed, the next thing we need to do is tell Git who you are because remember, Git tracks who makes each commit. So, it needs to know your name and email address. And this is really important because this information gets baked into every commit or change if you like that you make. And if you're working with other people on the project, they're going to see this information when they look at the project history, so they can see who made what changes. So, let's set this up. Then, we need to open a terminal, and we're going to type a git command, which starts with git. All git commands start with git. And by the way, don't worry too much about the command that we're writing right now. We're going to talk about how we use the command line in a later tutorial. And we're also going to see loads of different git commands. So don't worry too much about how this command is being written for now. Just kind of copy what I'm doing to set up these different properties. So we say get config and then we're going to use what's known as a flag by typing double dash and then global. And this is basically saying we're going to set a certain property from the config globally on our computer. The property we're going to set is the user.name. So type out that next. And then we need to add quotes and put in whatever your name is. So for me, the whole thing is going to be gitconfig- global user.name and then I'm going to type sha p for my name. All right. And then press enter. And that sets the username globally on our computer. All right. So next we're going to set an email address. So this time we'll type get config again. Then we'll use the flag global. So double- global. And then we're going to say user email this time. And again we're going to use quotes. And this time add your email address. I'm just going to add in a dummy one. This doesn't exist, so don't try emailing it. So, these are two git commands we've just run here, right? And they both start with that word git. And that's going to be a common theme because whenever we run a git command, we need to start it with the word git. And you might be wondering about that global bit. Like I just said, this is a flag. And in this case, it just says set these settings globally for all repositories that we make on our computer. Okay. So, you can actually override these settings on a per project basis if you need to, but for most people, global settings are going to work just fine. Once you've set these up, you can check they're correct by running another command, which is get config, and then we're going to use that global flag again. So, double dash global. And then after that, we're going to uh use another flag, which is list double-list, and then press enter. And that is going to show you all of your global git settings. and you should see your name and email address in there that you just added. If you need to, you can change them later. Just run the same commands again with new values. All right, then. So, hopefully you've now got Git installed and working on your computer. And in the next lesson, we're going to set up Visual Studio Code, which is the editor we'll be using throughout the course. Okay, then my friends. So, we've got Git installed and configured now. And in this lesson, we're going to set up Visual Studio Code as our main development environment. Now, you don't have to use VS Code if you'd prefer to use something else. You can use whatever editor you like, but VS Code gives us a nice visual representation of what's happening with the Git repository. You can see which files have changed, what those changes are, and you can stage and commit changes without ever touching the command line if that's what you want to do. Now, we're going to be using the command line a lot because I think that's really important to learn. But having the visual layer on top makes everything so much easier to understand, especially when you're starting out and even to be honest when you're experienced and you just want to make a few quick changes or see what's been changed at a glance. Anyway, to install VS Code, just head to code.visisualstudio.com and click on the download button. It's going to autodetect which operating system you're on and you'll be able to download the appropriate version. Once you've downloaded and installed VS Code, you can open it up and you should be greeted with this welcome tab. And from here you can open a project folder by clicking on this open folder link right here. Or you can do the same thing by going to file and then open folder. So I'm going to open up the 8bit dev folder which is the dummy project that we're going to be working on for most of this series. Now if you want to work on the same project as me, you can download it from GitHub on this page right here and I will leave a link to the page down below the video. So this is your first foray into GitHub. The only thing we need to do is download this starter project, which is really simple to do. First, make sure you select the starter project from this drop-own list over here. This is called a branch. We're going to learn about branches later. For now, just select where it says starter project one. And second, click on the code button and then choose to download a zip of this project. That's going to download a zip folder of the project on your computer. Once you've downloaded it, you need to unzip the folder first of all and then you can open up the project inside it within VS Code just like I showed you. So then once you've got a folder open, we can start using Git to track changes in the project. Now we'll do that in the next chapter, but for now I just want to show you a couple of things. First, VS Code comes with an integrated terminal which you can open by going to the terminal up here and then going to new menu. Now when you select that option, the terminal should open at the bottom and it should already be in your project directory. So later any git commands we run are going to be from this terminal integrated into VS code. You can also toggle this terminal panel by coming to the panel icon in the top right and clicking it. The keyboard shortcut for that is controll + J I think or command and J on a Mac. And then second you should be able to see a bunch of icons on the left over here. This one here is for the built-in Git tools that come with VS Code. If you click on it now, you might not see much, but we'll later have a look around this and see what it can do. And finally, we can open the extensions panel by clicking on this icon of four little squares right here. And from here, we can install any extensions that we want. Now, I'm not going to suggest installing any particular Git extensions just yet, but I think later on in the course, we'll be installing a couple of different things to supercharge VS Code with some additional Git functionality. And those extensions are most likely going to be Git Graph and Git Lens. So, we'll see both of those later on. Next up though, before we do any work with Git, I want to spend a few minutes getting you up to speed with the command line. Nothing crazy or complicated, so don't worry. Just the basics and enough to get started.