Before going into coding, I wanted to talk about software version control and the perks of using it in your daily life. The version control, simply, is a repository (storage location). In the repository, the source code, and other files, from a software project. Every changes made to the software project will be track along with the user’s name who made the change.
While using version control, users are allowed to roll back to previous versions of the project. This means that if ever a version in the repository was problematic, a given user would be able to select a working version. The repository are needed, I would say vital, when doing a collaborative development work. Being able to track what each and everyone did on the team is a huge bonus. Plus, since it is online, there’s no need of having a dedicated server which would have to contain all the information of the project.
For developers, a software is never done. The project is always growing, we always want to find different ways to improve a software and make it better. While doing so, they’ll want to compare previous versions to understand the many changes that happen in a software. Like it was mentioned earlier, every version is tracked so, it easy to perform such a task.
I’m telling you about this because I consider this as an important subject to talk about in the dev world. Plus, while I’m talking about different topics in this blog, when I’ll create mini-series to go deeper into a subject, the software application will be available to you, the reader. There are different ways to exploit the software version control. In my case, I’m using https://github.com/.
With GitHub, after you’ve created your account, you’ll be able to create public and private repositories. The benefit of creating your repositories in the private mode is to just allow yourself and the allowed collaborator to access your software project. When you create a public repository, any given user will be able to access your project.
To have an easy access to any versions of a GitHub project, I’ll introduce you to an user interface of GitHub : SourceTree. It is a software that can be used by Windows and OS X users. With the SourceTree software, you’ll be able to “clone” a repository with the HTTPS url link from the project. You’ll be able to find the software with this link http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/
This being said, you’ll have accessed to my public repositories with link https://github.com/Kavignon. In brief, repositories are tracked storage location which provide users the ability of reverting on a different version of a project or any file of the project. At first, you can ask yourself why you’re actually doing this, but later you’ll see you can’t live without it! It is really helpful!
Kevin
Black Coding Adventures 