What is Git?

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.Git is easy to learn and has a tiny footprint with lightning fast performance.

The Git feature that really makes it stand apart from nearly every other Source Control Management (SCM) out there is its branching model. Git allows and encourages you to have multiple local branches that can be entirely independent of each other. The creation, merging, and deletion of those lines of development takes seconds.

This means that you can do things like frictionless context switching, role-based codelines, feature-based workflow, and disposable experimentation. Git is fast. With Git, nearly all operations are performed locally, giving it a huge speed advantage on centralized systems that constantly have to communicate with a server somewhere.

Git was built to work on the Linux kernel, meaning that it has had to effectively handle large repositories from day one. Git is written in C, reducing the overhead of runtimes associated with higher-level languages. Speed and performance has been a primary design goal of the Git from the start.

Unlike the other systems, Git has something called the "staging area" or "index". This is an intermediate area where commits can be formatted and reviewed before completing the commit. One thing that sets Git apart from other tools is that it's possible to quickly stage some of your files and commit them without committing all of the other modified files in your working directory or having to list them on the command line during the commit.

Git is released under the GNU General Public License version 2.0 which is an open source license.

Git Availability

As of December 2014 Git is available on all of our servers. If you have any questions about Git get in touch with support.

Git Help

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