From the course: Git for System Administration

What is version control? - Git Tutorial

From the course: Git for System Administration

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What is version control?

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- [Instructor] This course covers Git, a very popular, open source, and free version control system. Specifically, we focus on using version control for system administration. Before we delve into that, let's talk about version control itself. To demonstrate what version control is I'll start with an example. Let's say we save a document as Document1.txt. This would be the first version of the document. Later, we update the document and save it as Document2.txt. That would be the second version of the document. And lastly, we make more changes and save it a third time as Document3.txt. Now we have three versions of the document stored as three different files. This would allow us to go back to a previous version if we wanted to and even compare two versions manually, either using tools such as diff or perhaps just viewing the files ourself. There are problems with a system like this though. After we've made hundreds of changes, the system gets unwieldy. Also, if we're but one person in a team collaborating on a project and more than one person is working on the same document, things can get complex fast. Multiple people may have versions with the same names that are not identical files. What a version control system does is manage versions for us. Each time we save the document, we save it back to the original name and the version control system keeps track of the changes for us. This allows us to revert to previous versions, compare versions, and even collaborate with other people who are also working on the same document. This last item is important. It shows who made changes and what those changes were. You have probably used version control in some form before. You may have used file names to control versions, like the scenario I just mentioned. Photo editors like Photoshop and the GIMP have history palettes and panes that allow you to roll back changes in a photo. Microsoft Word has history tracking. OpenOffice and LibreOffice have change marks and Google Drive has version activity. The changes are stored in the document. If you share the file with someone else, and they give it back to you with changes, you'll be able to review those changes. A lot of cloud storage solutions have version control on files as well, such as Google Drive or Box.com. Every time I upload a file, they bump the version number and allow me to revert back to a previous version. This course focuses on using version control for system administration. Specifically, the Git version control system. Git is open source, meaning everyone has access to the source code. Free, as in you don't have to pay for it. Very popular among programmers, specially open source programmers, very powerful, and distributed. This last item, we'll talk more about in the next movie.

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