Git
The version control system that records every change to your code and makes teamwork possible.
Git is a version control system that records every change made to a project's code as a browsable history. Created by Linus Torvalds in 2005, it is now the most widely used version control tool in the world.
Think of Git as an automatic history keeper for your project. Instead of saving copies of a document as 'v1', 'v2', 'final', and 'final-really', Git records every change as a 'commit' (a saved snapshot), along with who made it, when, and why. At any point, the project can be rolled back to any earlier state - nothing is ever truly lost.
Git was created in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system, and is now maintained by a large open-source community. It is free and open source under the GPL-2.0 license. Virtually every professional software project today - from solo developers to the largest technology companies - is built on Git.
For teams, Git's key strength is branching and merging. Each developer works on their own 'branch' (a parallel line of work split off from the main code) - one person builds a new page while another fixes a bug - without stepping on each other's changes. When a piece of work is finished and reviewed, it is 'merged' back into the main code. This eliminates the chaos of emailing zip files back and forth.
Git should not be confused with GitHub or GitLab: Git is the tool that runs on a computer, while GitHub is a platform for hosting and sharing Git projects online. A simple analogy: Git is the camera, GitHub is the photo-sharing site. Because the code lives both on developers' machines and on a remote server, the risk of losing it drops to nearly zero.
Frequently asked questions
Git is a tool that keeps a complete history of every change made to a project's files. Each change is saved as a 'commit' - a snapshot recording what changed, who changed it, and when. This makes it possible to undo mistakes, compare versions, and let several people work on the same project without overwriting each other.
