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:
Interactive tutorial for using git and github at the command line