Git is an example of “distributed version control”, in contrast with earlier models of “centralised version control”. Other distributed version control systems include mercurial, darcs and bazzar.

One of the nice things about distributed verison control is, well, distributing your code including its history. Sites like github and bitbucket have become very popular with academics and non-academics for distributing source and for managing projects.

As an example of how this is has been used, see this paper by Ethan White and the “weecology” lab. You can see the whole history of the project, and how different people have contributed. In particular, you can see the graph of how different changes were incorporated by different authors. This is a fairly extreme example!

Most of my PhD research is contained within a repository on github that I still mantain. Because this is a project that people have used for a while, it’s nice that the full history is mantained as people can run analyses against previous versions of the package if their results change.

Both bitbucket and github offer academic accounts, but require you to sign up with your university email.

Setting up a project on one of these sites is as easy as:

1. Creating the repository online (click a button prominently displayed on the website).
2. Tell your local git repository about the presence of a repository, with something like git remote add origin git@github.com:usernane/reponame.git
3. “Push” your content to the website with git push -u origin master

There is a bit more to it than that, but if you treat the repository as “write only” (that is just push changes), you’ll just have to do git push to push up all the new commits you’ve made since last time you pushed.