Git Version Control

Florian Oswald
jpe.dataeditor@gmail.com

Uni Turin, Collegio Carlo Alberto, SciencesPo Paris, JPE Data Editor

🆚 Git vs. Dropbox for Version Control

Feature Git Dropbox
Version History Full commit history with messages Keeps older versions, no clear log
Understanding Changes Line-by-line diffs, commit messages No diffs, no context for changes
Branching & Merging Yes — supports parallel development No — one version at a time
Collaboration Designed for multiple developers Risk of overwrite when editing together
Offline Access Fully local; sync when ready Needs internet to sync versions
Project Structure Tracks full directory state Syncs files individually
Intended Use Code & structured text, reproducibility General file storage and backup
  • ✅ Git is a professional-grade version control system.
  • 📦 Dropbox is great for basic backups, not for collaborative code development.

Tracking Things

  • We only track code (i.e. text files!) with version control.
  • (We can track small datasets. Github has a 100MB file size limit)
  • In our JPE org, we will never track data with version control.
  • Data will be downloaded directly from the dataverse deposit, where authors submit their packages.

Preview of JPE Workflow

  1. Each paper will get a github repository.
  2. The repo contains
    1. all code contained in the package
    2. the paper and the appendix pdfs,
    3. template code with my tools,
    4. and the reports I prepare for you and which you will edit.
  3. You will not send me emails with pdfs, but you will push a commit to this repo.

if you have been following along 🧐

What is not contained in the repo?

Open your VScode

  1. Explain program
  2. create directory under your home directory (or anywhere really)
  3. create a text file
  4. open terminal (shift-cmd-P and type terminal)
  5. create text file in terminal:
echo "This is the first version of the file." > notes.txt

is this git?

git status
  • error. not a git repo. not tracking anything.
  • Alright, let’s start tracking.
git init

git status

  • git status informs you about the current status of the repo.
  • Let’s record the current state.
  • We need to first select which files to record (with git add), then we actually add them to history with git commit.

let’s add some code

# add to code.R
print("hi! drawing a random number")
timestamp()
runif(1)

Let’s add a readme

like here

Resources

  1. ScPoProgramming
  2. Getting Started with github Desktop