How Git and GitHub Work Together

Introduction

Not long ago, organizations were not worried about whether or not source (version) control existed. This was, however, until organizations realized code was walking out the front door, software deployments were failing because of bugs that were fixed already, and the lack of history about the code. It was more than normal for code to be kept on a developer’s machine or in a shared drive.

The problem with the “no source control” approach is there isn’t any history of the code, no tests being run, and no innovation between teams. Source control opens up the locked door of code being in a location that no one knows about and allows everyone to share ideas while delivering quality.

Source control also has the ability to help collaboration between teams while writing code. Anyone on the team, in any country, at any time of the day can work on code together. The participants collaborating don’t even have to be on the same team. There could be a QA engineer, DevOps engineer, and cloud engineer all working on the same codebase together.

In this chapter, you will dive deep into how Git and GitHub helps make source control and collaboration possible. By the end of this chapter, you will have a clear understanding of what it means to not only practice source control best practices, but also understand the ins and outs of Git and GitHub for storing development and deployable production code.