Setting up the Repository


Modern version control systems are wonderful. Gone are the days of manually saving old versions of files in case you break something; version control systems save a copy of every version that existed, and let you rewind to an old version with a single command. They also make it easy to distribute files, and allow different team members to work on different versions, and then merge their work.  Our version control system is called git (http://www.git-scm.com/).

 

Version control systems are most commonly used for program source code. However, git helps when working with any type of file. Learning how to upload (push) and download (pull) files with git takes only a few minutes, and should be enough git knowledge for everything except programming (and perhaps editing data files).

 

You can see the latest changes and browse everything in the git repository at https://github.com/jkoppel/project-ironfist . You'll also be able to download everything in a zip file. However, if you want it to be easier to receive the latest updates, or to make changes yourself, you'll need to use Mercurial to copy the repository onto your machine, and push changes back to the server.

 

Unless you are at home in the command line, you should start off by downloading one of the git GUI clients. GitHub for Windows (https://windows.github.com/) and GitHub for Mac (https://mac.github.com/) are good and easy-to-use choices.