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1. Getting Started
- 1.1 About Version Control
- 1.2 A Short History of Git
- 1.3 What is Git?
- 1.4 The Command Line
- 1.5 Installing Git
- 1.6 First-Time Git Setup
- 1.7 Getting Help
- 1.8 Summary
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2. Git Basics
- 2.1 Getting a Git Repository
- 2.2 Recording Changes to the Repository
- 2.3 Viewing the Commit History
- 2.4 Undoing Things
- 2.5 Working with Remotes
- 2.6 Tagging
- 2.7 Git Aliases
- 2.8 Summary
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3. Git Branching
- 3.1 Branches in a Nutshell
- 3.2 Basic Branching and Merging
- 3.3 Branch Management
- 3.4 Branching Workflows
- 3.5 Remote Branches
- 3.6 Rebasing
- 3.7 Summary
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4. Git on the Server
- 4.1 The Protocols
- 4.2 Getting Git on a Server
- 4.3 Generating Your SSH Public Key
- 4.4 Setting Up the Server
- 4.5 Git Daemon
- 4.6 Smart HTTP
- 4.7 GitWeb
- 4.8 GitLab
- 4.9 Third Party Hosted Options
- 4.10 Summary
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5. Distributed Git
- 5.1 Distributed Workflows
- 5.2 Contributing to a Project
- 5.3 Maintaining a Project
- 5.4 Summary
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6. GitHub
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7. Git Tools
- 7.1 Revision Selection
- 7.2 Interactive Staging
- 7.3 Stashing and Cleaning
- 7.4 Signing Your Work
- 7.5 Searching
- 7.6 Rewriting History
- 7.7 Reset Demystified
- 7.8 Advanced Merging
- 7.9 Rerere
- 7.10 Debugging with Git
- 7.11 Submodules
- 7.12 Bundling
- 7.13 Replace
- 7.14 Credential Storage
- 7.15 Summary
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8. Customizing Git
- 8.1 Git Configuration
- 8.2 Git Attributes
- 8.3 Git Hooks
- 8.4 An Example Git-Enforced Policy
- 8.5 Summary
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9. Git and Other Systems
- 9.1 Git as a Client
- 9.2 Migrating to Git
- 9.3 Summary
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10. Git Internals
- 10.1 Plumbing and Porcelain
- 10.2 Git Objects
- 10.3 Git References
- 10.4 Packfiles
- 10.5 The Refspec
- 10.6 Transfer Protocols
- 10.7 Maintenance and Data Recovery
- 10.8 Environment Variables
- 10.9 Summary
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A1. Appendix A: Git in Other Environments
- A1.1 Graphical Interfaces
- A1.2 Git in Visual Studio
- A1.3 Git in Visual Studio Code
- A1.4 Git in IntelliJ / PyCharm / WebStorm / PhpStorm / RubyMine
- A1.5 Git in Sublime Text
- A1.6 Git in Bash
- A1.7 Git in Zsh
- A1.8 Git in PowerShell
- A1.9 Summary
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A2. Appendix B: Embedding Git in your Applications
- A2.1 Command-line Git
- A2.2 Libgit2
- A2.3 JGit
- A2.4 go-git
- A2.5 Dulwich
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A3. Appendix C: Git Commands
- A3.1 Setup and Config
- A3.2 Getting and Creating Projects
- A3.3 Basic Snapshotting
- A3.4 Branching and Merging
- A3.5 Sharing and Updating Projects
- A3.6 Inspection and Comparison
- A3.7 Debugging
- A3.8 Patching
- A3.9 Email
- A3.10 External Systems
- A3.11 Administration
- A3.12 Plumbing Commands
A2.1 Appendix B: Embedding Git in your Applications - Command-line Git
If your application is for developers, chances are good that it could benefit from integration with source control. Even non-developer applications, such as document editors, could potentially benefit from version-control features, and Git’s model works very well for many different scenarios.
If you need to integrate Git with your application, you have essentially two options: spawn a shell and call the git command-line program, or embed a Git library into your application.
Here we’ll cover command-line integration and several of the most popular embeddable Git libraries.
Command-line Git
One option is to spawn a shell process and use the Git command-line tool to do the work. This has the benefit of being canonical, and all of Git’s features are supported. This also happens to be fairly easy, as most runtime environments have a relatively simple facility for invoking a process with command-line arguments. However, this approach does have some downsides.
One is that all the output is in plain text. This means that you’ll have to parse Git’s occasionally-changing output format to read progress and result information, which can be inefficient and error-prone.
Another is the lack of error recovery. If a repository is corrupted somehow, or the user has a malformed configuration value, Git will simply refuse to perform many operations.
Yet another is process management. Git requires you to maintain a shell environment on a separate process, which can add unwanted complexity. Trying to coordinate many of these processes (especially when potentially accessing the same repository from several processes) can be quite a challenge.
