GIT for personal use?

Soldato
Joined
3 Apr 2003
Posts
2,928
Hey all,

As a programming student I am constantly switching between working on my laptop, desktop, uni computer.

I was thinking of setting up a git for myself though i have no knowledge of it and just started reading a git pro book on train yesterday. It looks complicated but am sure its not as bad as looks and would be invaluable down the line in team projects/real world work.

So is git a good idea for sharing between my laptop and desktop and what would be the best way of setting it up? Should i keep a repo on my usb stick? Or use an online thing like bitbucket? I just want to ensure that i can work primarily on my desktop, but switch laptop on/at uni and carry on working with minimal fuss.

Thanks for any tips/advice.
 
One advantage of Bitbucket over GitHub is that you can have unlimited private repos for free, whereas you have to pay for any on GitHub. Could be something to consider if it's not code you want to have on-show. Git is pretty easy to use, at least on a basic level (you can do some nifty stuff with it as you learn the more advanced features). :)
 
If you are using visualstudio then have you considered team foundation service. I use this as my prefered sourcesafe/ project management repository. It is free to use at the moment.

you can use either tfs or git as the source control solution under the hood. I use tfs myself. Purely as I am more familar with it's features.
 
Just to throw another out there, Gitlab.

I recently migrated our company over to using git, and to mimic what our SVN based system had there was a call for a 'central point'. I setup a gitlab instance on a spare machine and we all push to that.

If you signup on gitlab.com, then you can use their hosted version - I think the only restrictions lie in how many people you can add to a team.. I can't remember exactly.

Something I felt uneasy about with github was there drive to force you to centralise everything, git is distributed and the clients you use shouldn't try and force a central point (synchronise button in the github app.. masks a lot of functions).
 
BTW private Github is free for students so no need for Bitbucket. I use got for everything including personal stuff. It is great for structuring your workflow and having backups across different devices.
 
BTW private Github is free for students so no need for Bitbucket. I use got for everything including personal stuff. It is great for structuring your workflow and having backups across different devices.

Oh I didn't know that I will look into it thanks. Recommend having the repo on that then instead of one of my machines?

Is okay for multiple little projects right, will it just back up a whole project folder or do you make individual repo things for each little program?
 
Repo for each project, usually.

Remember that the key point of git is that it is distributed, so if you have a repo on github and then do a pull to your local device, you'll have a copy of the whole repo - not just the current snap shot. You can then mess around on that, commit to the local repo and then when you're done - push it back to the one stored on github.

Git's power is in branches, read up on them and use them. They're light weight and meant to be used extensively :)
 
Yes, keep the repo on github/bitbucket. Though it'll be distributed anyway, so the repo will be cloned to whatever device you clone to. However it's a good idea to keep the github/bitbucket as the "central" repo that every cloned repo pushes to and pulls from.
 
Signed up for my student github last night thanks for the heads up :) Does it actually offer anything over bitbucket?

Anyhow i am currently working through a programming book before uni starts back up and am coding all of the examples in the book. How would you go about using git for that? Would you just add the project/workspace folder in its entirety to a git? I guess i could keep doing individual ones as i am writing a program then just take it off git once done but i kind of want to be able to access them from both machines.
 
Found it much easier to use GitHub with Windows than BitBucket. I just couldn't get the authentication working. :(
 
Tbh I've only used Bitbucket with SourceTree on the Mac which is a great GUI, makes working from two different machines in two different offices so much easier.
 
If using Git... Should have a look at git flow. Brilliant. Allows you to easily manage and switc bbetween branches.

You have a master/develop/features and hotfixes.

Might not be so useful for a student work but worth a look.
 
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