Version Control with Git

by Yannic Bracke (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena), Christian Knüpfer (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)

Tuesday 30 Nov 2021, 10:00 → Tuesday 7 Dec 2021, 12:00 Europe/Berlin

Online (Zoom)

If you have ever written a paper or worked with research data, some of the following problems may sound familiar to you: You have accidentally overwritten something and would like to get it back from an earlier version of your file(s). You find yourself looking through a bunch of older versions wondering what exactly has changed between your current version and the older version. You and a colleague work on the same files and have to e-mail different versions back and forth. You and a colleague use a shared folder (e.g. Nextcloud, Dropbox) but made edits at the same time, so some of your edits are lost.  

These unpleasant situations can be avoided by using git. As a version control system, git helps you to keep track of your work and to collaborate with other people. It enables easy documentation, the saving and retrieving of earlier versions and working with others in the same directory or even on the same file at the same time.

Git has been mostly used for software development so far - but this should not put off researchers from non-technical disciplines. The git basics are easy to learn and easy to apply. In this course, you are introduced to the fundamental features of git and learn how to use it in your daily work.