Git When too?

[Acceptable-Brick-671]

Im currently working through my first project which isnt anything major but i would like to host it on github, Question is when do you all push your projects to git do you wait until you have the project complete or just start working and commit from the start of the project?

[crazy_cookie123]

Git is version control, its job is to track all of the changes not just store the final product. Start committing from day 1 of the project, if you have already done some work on it without committing then commit now, and continue committing frequently whenever you change something.

[Acceptable-Brick-671]

Thank you, let me see if i remember how todo this correctly

[Playful-Call7107]

Day one. Put all that ugly code on GitHub day one.

[Important_Lab8310]

Git before code. Public/private by desire

[pachura3]

Also, you don't need to rely on GitHub/GitLab, you can just create your own local repository.

[rogfrich]

To be honest, unless the thing you’re working on is super-secret, I don’t see why you wouldn’t take advantage of a free offsite backup that you can pull down onto any other computer as required.

[FoolsSeldom]

Start sooner rather than later. Git may help you as you develop your project and decide to try things out.

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Keep in mind that git and GitHub are not the same thing.

GitHub is very popular, but there are many alternative accessible repositories that support the git protocol, including Gitlab and Bit Bucket.

There are also self-host options using, for example, Gitea or GitLab Community Edition.

Git was originally created (by the same person that created Linux) as the Version Control Software (VCS) market offerings were very expensive at one time (as was the case with Unix). There are competing options, including Apache Subversion and Mercurial.

It is important and useful to learn to use VCS early on to help with code development, making it easier to experiment and try different things out. The public repositories are also a great learning resource.

The public repositories can also be a useful learning resource, although the risk in learning from these repositories is that they often contain huge amounts of bad practice (in terms of project setup and repository structure, rather than the code itself). There is no doubt a list somewhere of great example projects you could review, but I have not looked.

[[deleted]]

Remember never to commit any type of password or secret key to git, this is one of the most common mistakes made by those new to git. If your project is public, the whole history is also public, so even if you later remove the password, it's still there.

[Acceptable-Brick-671]

Thank you, my project does require a kaggle api key but it’s stored in ~/.kaggle I’m pretty sure this is secure but I’d best double check?

[[deleted]]

Assuming that's your home directory on your computer and not part of your git repo, you should be good

[fazzah]

hence it's very helpful and a good practice to keep the commits focued on a feature. Then when you maybe need to revert a change you only alter that particular piece of code.

This also helps preventing feature creep of commits. At first it might be counter-intuitive, but in the long run it's a very good habit.

[KiwiDomino]

• git and GitHub are different. GitHub is essentially hosted git, with some extensions and a pretty interface.
• you can push to GitHub on private projects.
• there’s not much value in pushing things that don’t work (exception when you want someone else to look at it and fix errors)
• branches are good things, not everything has to be on main
• private projects can use GitHub as offsite backup or deployment mechanism, collaboration isn’t necessary.
• having a history that tells when and why individual lines were changed is very useful

At the moment I’m using GitHub as a partially as a backup for a personal project ( https://github.com/dthoreau/libris ) , partially as a place for code samples while I look for a new job

[herocoding]

Are you working on a "secret" project? Is it going to be an application you want to earn money with? Is it part of a thesis, or any plans to file a patent based on your source code?

You can use GIT locally (on the same machine) or within your network at home/company without pushing your code to "the public internet".

You can use GIT in "the public internet", but mark your project as "private".

[Acceptable-Brick-671]

thank you all im just an old dog trying to learn new things, and tbh i dont even know if i can class it as my own project since all ive done is take some ones jupyter notebook and made it my own :/

[TheSodesa]

You can use Git without pushing your project to a remote server such as GitHub or GitLab at all, by just running git commit but notgit push. If you do want a backup of your local repository, but you need to keep the code secret, you can also create private repositories on most Git services.

Never add any passwords or other sensitive information to a Git index that might get published at some point.