Git version control

Git is a program to track changes in text files, and is therefore very useful in source code development. It saves intermediate versions with comments, allowing you to go back to an older version of your code, without saving several copies of it.

In the NWO cookiecutter template, there are two directories that can benefit from version control: src and paper. The src directory contains your Python source code and notebooks. The paper directory can be used to host your LaTeX paper project. In this Section, we concentrate on the src directory.

How git works is explained in the Carpentries version control workshop.

Initialize Git for the src directory

To start using version control for this directory, you can give the commands below. Make sure that you are in the src/ directory before you give these commands:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initialise git for the project"

From now on, the source directory is under version control.

Upload your local repository (Optional)

One of the main advantages of git is that you can upload your repository to a server. This is helpful as backup, but it also allows you to collaborate with others. We will assume here that we just upload to Github for backup purposes and personal note taking.

Since you have an existing src directory already, you need to create an empty project on github.com. If you do not want to share your software with others (yet), then make sure that you create a private repository. Uncheck the option to create a README file when you create a new project. Once your Github project is created, you can add the URL to your local git repository:

git remote add origin git@github.com:/your_project.git
git push -u origin main

Github have certain security measures in place to protect against unauthorized uploads. For SSH access, an SSH key should be created and added to your account. If you want to connect through HTTPS, then you need to create special access tokens You can ask your data steward if you have trouble pushing your changes to the online repository.

Setting up the Github project

Although we do not go into this further in this workshop, you can read more about setting up a Github project in “The Turing way handbook” in the section version control and Creating project repositories. The last section is especially helpful if you are going to work on the software with collaborators.