2 What is Git?

Git is a version control system - think of it like a time machine of your project. If something goes wrong with your current version, you can go back in time to a previous version that worked.

Git is especially useful when you are collaborating with other co-writers. You don’t have to ping-pong your documents via e-mail.

Cloud services like Dropbox are awesome, but with Git, you get a more powerful version controlling feature (i.e., the “time machine”).

You can build a whole research compendum and push it with Git to a repository. A research compendum is basically like a collection of folders consisting of all intellectual content of your research project, e.g. codes for the statistical analyses, manuscripts, figures and so forth.

By the way, you might be asking yourself, whether I have pushed this very guide, too, to a remote repository with Git? Well, I think you know the answer already.

2.1 Git vs. GitLab, GitHub, and other platforms

It’s important to understand that Git is the version control system itself, while GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, and similar services are online platforms that host Git repositories. Think of Git as the engine, and these platforms as the garage where you store your car. You can use Git locally on your computer without any of these platforms, but these services make it easier to collaborate with others and backup your work in the cloud.

In this tutorial, we will be using GitLab as our remote Git service. While the core Git concepts and commands remain the same regardless of which platform you choose, the specific steps for setting up accounts, creating repositories, and managing your code online will be demonstrated using GitLab.

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In the next chapter, I’ll tell what you have to do to use Git on your computer.

Lightning Fast GitLab Guide for UTU Users by Ville Langén is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.