Version Control¶

Have you ever saved like five copies of the same document on your desktop? Maybe:

• file1.txt

• file2.txt

• file3FINAL.txt

• final4REALLYFINAL.txt

• finalFINAL.txt

This is generally not great practice if we want to be able to collaboratively work on a document or code, and especially if we want to be able to restore and review preview versions. To help with this problem, we use version control.

Version Control Systems¶

A version control system (vcs) is going to help you track and manage changes to code or other documents. Thus, version control is the practice around this tracking of changes. The easiest way to think about it is that when you create some texty files on your local machine, you can initialize a little database alongside it that says “I want to save the changes I’ve made at my current state” and then “okay, I want to push these to a remote server to work on with others.” The most common version control software is git, however some people still use others. For these pages, we will walk through getting started with version control.