Visual Studio Code for Python Developers Transcripts
Chapter: Source Control with Git
Lecture: What is Source Control and Why Do You Need It?
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Hello and welcome to Chapter 8, Source Control with Git.
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We're going to be diving into what it's like using Git and Source Control Management within Visual Studio Code.
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We're going to step through things like what is Source Control and why do you need it.
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We're going to talk about working with a repo within Visual Studio Code and Source Control Management around that.
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And then we'll talk about how you can do common things with it, like viewing and syncing your changes, committing changes, pulling.
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What else, Cecil? Anything else I'm missing out of that? What else would you do with it?
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Yeah, just overall, how do I manage the assets that make up my application?
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Whether it's your code, but also your configuration or your build setup, or maybe even have your data.
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How do you version some of these things and share them with your team?
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And so these are some of the things that we're going to cover in this particular module.
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So Brian, why don't we start off with the question, the question. What is Source Control? So first off, VS Code is natively built to...
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to work with Git Source Control Management. If you're not familiar with that, you can go to git-scm.com to learn more about it.
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But essentially, it's a way of tracking changes in a folder that you might have.
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And being able to revert back to certain history, keep those things in sync,
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and be able to track that better for your project and files and assets that you're going to be working on within that project.
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So again, Visual Studio Code is built natively to support that, but can support other Source Control. Management systems.
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Cecil, do you know some of the other ones that are available then and how they might be available? I do.
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And you know what, back in my day, I have to say, back in my day, I used to use a source control provider called Subversion SVN.
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This was earlier on, very different from how Git is set up. The differences aren't really important for this particular course.
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But if you want to take a look at it, it is still available. It's still actively maintained, I believe. And so...
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There are probably a lot of folks out there that still use it as well. I know Mercurial is another option for Source Control Management that folks use.
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I think Mercurial is a little bit closer to Git in terms of how it shares the assets around.
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So, and if you want to be able to support those other Source Control Management systems,
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since Git is the only one that is natively built into VS Code, it's available to you through an extension.
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If you head on over to Visual Studio Code and you go into the extensions view,
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you can filter by category SCM providers, Source Control Management providers.
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And within there, the list that you'll see is SVN, like Cecil was just talking about, or Mercurial and other options that you might have within there to help support that Source Control Management system within Visual Studio Code.
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And in this video, what we're going to do is explore that integration of Git inside of VS Code.
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You're going to see how to work with repositories, pull them down and initialize them on your machine.
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And also how do you share those changes with your teammates and then look at some of the other like really cool features built into VS Code that make working with Git a little bit nicer.
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So when it comes to managing like your GitHub repos and projects and things of that nature,
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you obviously have the option to just host it yourself on your machine. That's totally fine.
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Or maybe you have your own little network set up in your home office. You can host it there as well.
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And you can have like your little distributed system of Git repositories. And I know some folks that do that, but if you wanted to,
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you also have the option of hosting it online.
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And there's a few different service providers that are available that allow you to do that really easily.
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Probably the most popular one that a lot of developers use is GitHub.
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And as you can imagine, it lets you host Git repos, but it also helps you do things like manage discussions. And there's a build service in there.
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And then there's tons of other additional features that makes not only just managing your source control, but managing well, the management of your project and your conversations in your community a lot more easily.
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So I think that's a really good point. And I think that's a really good point.
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And so definitely recommend that if you don't have a GitHub account, make sure you go ahead and create one. You can create one for free.
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Another option for doing that as well is GitLab. Very similar to GitHub, but also very different from GitHub.
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Again, this is just another option that you can have for hosting your GitHub projects. I'm sorry, for hosting your Git projects online.
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So you can create public or private repos. You can have discussions.
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And then you can also have like, you know, corporate versions of it that you could use to work with your enterprise teams.
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But throughout the rest of this chapter, this module, we're going to be talking about different Git terms and ways to use Git and source control management.
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And if you're not familiar with those already, we highly recommend you check out the existing course on Talk Python, Up and Running with Git.
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If you check that out, that'll give you the knowledge and skill set and information that will help you understand what we're talking about.
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If it sounds foreign to you or unfamiliar, go ahead and check out that course.
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Now, from here in the next video, we're going to dive into working with a repo inside Visual Studio. Studio Code.