October 22, 2018

The GIT version control system - cloning

For many people, "git clone" may be the fundamental and perhaps only command they ever need and use. If you simply want to get files from some repository like github, you use the command: 
git clone URL
Where "URL" is whatever you are told to use to get the files. Some common examples might be something like: 
git clone https://github.com/trebisky/Kyu.git
git clone git://github.com/wally/goose.git
This gives you a working copy of the files, along with a local git repository (in the hidden directory ".git" along with some other stuf). Most people just want the files and might as well delete the ".git" directory and all that is in it.

On the other hand, if you intend to work with the files and want to use git to track your changes, keeping the local repository around will be useful (and a nice way to get started using git).

Using Clone to distribute files

If you have your own project and need to have copies of it on various machines, the thing to do is to have a master copy somewhere that is network accessible and use git clone to distribute copies. This leads to colaborative projects when various parties are involved. It is also a useful way to keep the distributed files up to date, since git has nice facilities for doing that when the master copy gets updates.
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Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org