If you are a part of a professional  software development setting, you would know how things work when it comes to writing code. There are usually different teams that write code – the development environment could have a team of developers that are sitting in the same location working closely with a team that is collaborating with them remotely from another part of the globe.

Both these teams write their code and contribute to a central codebase. This is where  version control systems or VCSs come into play. They manage codebase that collects code from different sources.

What is a version control system?

A version control system is a single point of reference for the contribution and management of all the stages and releases of a product, and it does this job without the need for having multiple files or folders. VCSs take out the issues that usually arise during the development phase, and streamline the entire process by not making developers trade files or folders.

Developers instead have a single source that they need to communicate with. It is this source that sees all the changes in the code. All the files are saved in this location. We have two types of VCSs that developers make use of around the world depending on their needs. These VCSs are

Centralized version control systems: These VCSs make use of a centralized repository where the project or codebase exists. This centralized project consists of all the files that are contributed by the developers of a team. If any developer wants to make changes to the project or the files stored in it, they need access to enter this repository.

Distributed version control systems: In these VCSs, things are a lot more flexible than their centralized counterparts. Mercurial and Git are the most common examples of distributed VCSs. In this system, every developer has its own local repository that not only has the code written by them and the changes that they made to it over a period of time but also their releases as well as those of other developers.

How does git work?

Git doesn’t work in the same way that most of the other version control systems do. Unlike other VCSs that calculate differences in files and sums these differences up to arrive at the saved version, git uses snapshots of your files system to do the job. Whenever you commit changes to the files or save the changed state of the project, you will have git taking a snapshot of the system and then saving it as a reference.

Files that don’t undergo any change will have their previous snapshot stored as a reference. Git provides developers a string of commands to help them perform different tasks. We will discuss top 30 git commands that are most commonly used by open source developers.

Git commands

All these commands that we will be discussing in this section have a big role to play in making the software development process a lot easier for developers. We will mention the most useful of those commands.

1. Configure details

2. Initialize repositories

3. Add files

4. Verify files that are added

5. Commit repository changes

6. Display logs

7. Verify git branches

8. Reset branches

9. Add new branches

10. Switch between branches

11. Display version

12. Consult manual page

13. Manage git configuration

14. Summarize log info

15. View modifications for each commit

16. Validate object database

17. List unpacked objects

18. Pack objects that aren’t already packed

19. Manage working trees

20. Look for patterns

21. Display remote repositories

22. Push updates

23. Pull new updates

24. Clone repositories

25. Stash working directory

26. Revert existing commits

27. Merge two branches

28. Check differences between files, commits, and tress

29. Add tags to projects

30. Fetch remote data

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