Managing Files with Git

Design and Build Great Web APIs — by Mike Amundsen (18 / 127)

👈 Understanding Web API Protocols, Practices, and Styles | TOC | What’s Next? 👉

A critical element in doing any API work is managing all the project files. That means being able to track all the changes you make to your files, sharing them in a way that allows others on your team to also make their own changes without overwriting yours, and — in case of serious problems — the ability to reverse one or more of those changes in order to undo whatever mistakes were made in the recent past. This kind of work falls under the category of version control systems (VCS) or source code management (SCM).

Over the years, developers have seen several systems for managing code files. Concurrent Versions System (CVS) was released in 1990, and Perforce came out in 1995. Another product, Apache Subversion (or SVN), was first released in 2001 and is still quite common today. For example, all the files for this book were managed in an SVN repository. Two other systems were released in 2005: Mercurial and Git. There have been several other systems for managing code files over the years, but so far, Git has been tracked as the most commonly used code management system, according to the report “Version Control Systems Popularity in 2016.” [22]

About Git

INFORMATION

The tool we’ll use to manage our project files is Git, the “free and open source…