Another thing to mention here is that it's not just developers that can benefit from Version Control, it's all members of the team to have visibility but also tools all having awareness or leverage, Project Management tools can be linked here, tracking the work. We might also have a build machine for example Jenkins which we will talk about in another module. A tool that Builds and Packages the system, automating the deployment tests and metrics.
### What is Git?
Git is a tool that tracks changes to source code or any file, or we could also say Git is an open-source distributed version control system.
There are many ways in which git can be used on our systems, most commonly or at least for me I have seen it in at the command line, but we also have graphical user interfaces and tools like Visual Studio Code that have git aware operations we can take advantage of.
Now we are going to run through a high-level overview before we even get Git installed on our local machine.
Let's take the folder we created earlier.
To use this folder with version control we first need to initiate this directory using the `git init command. For now, just think that this command puts our directory as a repository in a database somewhere on our computer.
Now we can create some files and folders and our source code can begin or maybe it already has and we have something in here already. We can use the `git add .` command which puts all files and folders in our directory into a snapshot but we have not yet committed anything to that database. We are just saying all files with the `.` are ready to be added.
Then we want to go ahead and commit our files, we do this with the `git commit -m "My First Commit"` command. We can give a reason for our commit and this is suggested so we know what has happened for each commit.
Another `git status` now shows everything is clean again.
We can then use the `git log` command which shows the latest changes and first commit.
If we wanted to see the changes between our commits i.e what files have been added or modified we can use the `git diff b8f8 709a`
Which then displays what has changed in our case we added a new file.
We can also and we will go deeper into this later on but we can jump around our commits i.e we can go time travelling! By using our commit number we can use the `git checkout 709a` command to jump back in time without losing our new file.
But then equally we will want to move forward as well and we can do this the same way with the commit number or you can see here we are using the `git switch -` command to undo our operation.
