Cloud Drops - Git 101 - Why use Git, and how to get started
Git is a distributed version control system — unlike centralised tools, every developer clones the full repository and history to their own machine, enabling productive offline work and independent branching without locking files.
The core workflow starts with git init to create a new repository in any folder, then git add to stage changes and git commit -m "message" to record them. git status shows which files are staged, modified, or untracked, while git log displays the full commit history. Once you create a remote repository on GitHub (or Azure DevOps, GitLab, Bitbucket), git remote add origin <url> links it to your local repo, and git push sends your commits up. Use git pull to receive changes others have pushed, or git clone <url> to bring down an entirely new repository. VS Code’s built-in Source Control panel provides a visual interface for all these operations, and the Git Credential Manager handles credential storage for private repositories across platforms.
Related Content
Cloud Drops - How does Git work behind the scenes?
Git stores all version history as compressed objects — commits, trees, and blobs — inside the .git folder. This Cloud Drop walks through the .git directory structure, uses git cat-file -p to inspect commit, tree, and blob objects, and shows how refs map human-readable branch names to commit hashes, including remote-tracking refs created when pushing to GitHub.
Cloud Drops - Introducing and Setting up Git LFS (Large File Storage)
Git LFS (Large File Storage) is a Git extension that replaces large binary files in your repository with lightweight text pointers, storing the actual data on a remote server. This Cloud Drop demonstrates git lfs install, git lfs track "*.mp3", staging and committing with LFS active, and using git clone --config lfs.fetchExclude to selectively skip large files when cloning.
GitHub Codespaces, Visual Studio Code and Remote Containers
Cloud with ChrisSetting up a development environment—installing the right SDK versions, extensions, and tools—wastes hours and causes 'works on my machine' problems. This episode shows how VS Code's Remote Containers extension and GitHub Codespaces solve this with containerised, reproducible dev environments defined in a devcontainer.json file. See a live demo of editing cloudwithchris.com entirely in a browser-based Codespace.