Frequently Asked Question

What exactly is Git?

Git is a distributed version control system: a tool that tracks every change to a set of files, records who made each change and when, and lets many people work on those files in parallel without overwriting each other's work. It was written by Linus Torvalds in 2005 after the Linux kernel project lost its commercial version control system, BitKeeper, and he could not find a free replacement that was fast enough or robust enough for kernel work.

Conceptually, a Git repository is a directed acyclic graph of commits. Each commit is a complete snapshot of every tracked file in the project, identified by a SHA-1 (or, in newer repositories, SHA-256) hash computed from its contents. Branches and tags are simply named pointers into this graph. Almost every Git command can be understood as moving data between four areas: the working directory, the staging area (index), the local repository, and a remote repository.