This is the fourth part of a twelve-day series on my new year’s resolutions to become a better Mac admin. During these twelve days my book “Packaging for Apple Administrators” is on sale! (Previous Post: “Test”)
Version Control is one of those habits that are a bit hard to get into, but once you have, you will wonder how you ever did without.
If your organization already has a version control solution and infrastructure in place, it is probably best to use that. There should be documentation, experienced users, and best practices which can help you get started.
If you are entirely new to this, however, git is probably the best place to start. git and GitHub are also very popular in the Mac admin community.
The easiest way to install git on macOS is to download and install Xcode. You can get Xcode for free from the Mac AppStore or from the Apple Developer download page. You can also get a standalone installer from the git page directly.
Version Control systems work best against text based files, such as code, xml, html and plain text or markdown files. However, they are not entirely useless when applied to files stored in a binary format.
The command line tool git has everything you need to start with version control. You can have local repositories or connect to a server over http[s] or ssh. Xcode and most text editors have git integration built in. There are a plethora of GUI git clients to choose from.
There are countless tutorials and books available. An astonishing amount of them are free:
- Official git documentation, including the free book “Pro Git” by Scott Chacon and Ben Straub (iBooks)
- Try Git Tutorial (by GitHub) Nice broswer based interactive tutorial
- GitHub Guides
- Think Like (a) Git
- Git Section on Free Programming Books