Guided: Git Configuration, Tagging, and Releases

Git is a collaborative tool - it's meant to help large groups of people, possibly separated by large distances or even spans of time, work together to build stable, maintainable, and useful software.

That's why it's essential that all your commits are signed with your name and email. This lets others working on the project know who contributed that amazing code (or, occasionally, that error-prone code!)

Luckily, you don't need to specify this information every time you make a commit. For your first task, you'll configure git to automatically use your preferred username and email.

Configuring Your Username and Email

Using the Terminal, you can configure default values for username and email when creating git commits. This is essential as having these values set is often required before Git will allow you to commit changes. Now when you make changes to your files, you'll see the commit you entered, with the username and email you just entered credited to the changes it contains.

Before beginning, you'll initialize the Git repository, which will cause Git to recognize your working directory as a Git repo and allow you to use commands such as git add on the files in the directory.

A Git repository isn't much use without any files to track and manage, so after you initialize the Git repository, you will add one file to it.

Git will often open a text editor to perform common tasks such as merging changes or applying a commit message.

However, you're not limited to using the default text editor provided by Git. You can use whichever text editor best suits your workflow, changing it as often as the task demands.

In short, Git can be customized to use the text editor of your choice. This allows you to use the same editor you use for editing code to edit commit messages.

To change your editor, input the following command in the Terminal:

git config --global core.editor <path-to-my-editor>

The value you input can be the alias of an editor, like vi, or a full path.

Commonly used editors include Sublime Text, Vim and Notepad++.

In the following task, you'll set your text editor to Vim.

Git provides tools for teams of developers to collaborate in an orderly and efficient manner. One way this is possible is by configuring a commit template.

When a commit template is specified, it will provide a custom structure for commit messages, allowing all developers to communicate with a unified voice.

In the following step, you'll create a custom commit message. Look to see the new template in action. First, add the new file to the git repo:

git add -A .

You'll now commit the code, but without specifying a message:

git commit

The text editor Vim will open, displaying the contents of your commit template!

To close the editor, type :q and press Enter.

As you've learned, Git is about more than saving your source code. It has many tools to help you stay organized!

One tool for staying organized is a tag. Tags are special labels that can be applied to commit messages.

Note how by default, git commits are labeled by a "sha", such as the following:

61849e8472b358b801b7e5e92cc8ef627ccb3c04

This is often abbreviated to the first 6-10 characters, like so:

61849e84

Note how this sha is not very personalized, and very hard to remember.

However, by using a tag, you can access this commit much more easily.

In the following task, you'll tag a Git commit. Now type git tag, and you should see your newly created tag.

You can now checkout this commit at any time by referencing it by it's tag name. For now, you'll leave the repo checked out to the commit it's currently on.

You can use tags to conveniently check Git code out to the commit associated with any tag.

This is a great way of resetting the state of a codebase to known, working state in order to troubleshoot bugs, or just get the system running again.

In the following task, you'll check out code by referring to its tag.

Sometimes, it's necessary to mark a git commit as one that's especially important or stable. For that, you can mark a commit as a release. Marking a commit as a release will mark it as such when reviewing tags, and software like Github may provide releases with their own page or custom markup.

Note that the Github feature called Releases is not the same as marking a tag as a release, and this is not a feature included in Git by default. The principle is the same, however.

In the following task, you'll mark a commit as a release. Now type git tag. You should see your new release among the tags listed.

Congratulations on completing this lab! Great job! You're now familiar with git tagging and configuration.

When you use Git in your day-to-day workplace tasks, you can complete tasks more confidently, using your text editor of choice, and marking important commits with tags and releases.