Git and GitHub

Git: versioning your system

Git is the version-control tool used to track the history of your project.

It lets you:

• keep a history of changes
• know who changed what
• go from local edits to recorded commits
• synchronize work between teammates
• recover from mistakes more safely

For a team project, Git is not optional. It is the mechanism that turns local work into shared work.

Configure your identity first

Before making commits, configure your Git name and email.

The email should match the identity you use on GitHub, typically either:

• your GitHub no-reply email address
• your school email address

Example:

git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email "your-email@example.com"

If the identity is wrong, authorship on commits may be attributed incorrectly.

Core Git actions in the project

In daily work, the core loop is usually:

git pull
git add .
git commit -m "Implement color_blue"
git push

You should pull before starting work, commit meaningful progress, and push before ending a session.

GitHub: more than a remote repository

GitHub hosts the remote repository, but for this course it also provides the rest of the project workflow.

Your GitHub repository contains:

• the shared remote copy of the code
• the issue tracker for features
• milestones and project-management information
• GitHub Actions workflows
• the evaluation workflow used by the teaching team

So Git is the local history mechanism, and GitHub is the shared collaboration and coordination platform around it.

Why this matters for grading

The teaching team evaluates what is present on main in GitHub, not what exists only on your laptop.

If your code is not pushed, it is not visible to teammates, workflows, or evaluators.

See also Workflows and Onboarding and Evaluation.