Working with git and github

git is a version control system used widely by software developers to manage their codebase, as it has excellent support for collaboration, allowing different individuals to work on the same codebase, and combine their efforts.

Github is an online service that uses the git version control system to store files and faciliatate collaboration on software projects. The code for PySD is hosted with github, as is that for much of the open source software community.

For system dynamicists, Github is a useful tool for tracking changes to a model or analysis code, documenting the development process, and facilitating model collaboration. For academics, it can serve as a permanent, citable repository for scripts used to prepare an academic paper, thus facilitating replication and extension of the research.

While the workflow may seem intimidating, once mastered it can prevent a lot of headaches.

Resources

Rather than include a tutorial of the github workflow in this cookbook, I’ll point to several resources for getting started with git and github: