Using someone else's project

Suppose you want to use someone else's source code. You could just download a file from his web site, or maybe a tar.gz-type archive. But maybe you want to keep up-to-date with the latest version of this code, and maybe you are interested in seeing the history of the code, the detailed changes introduced when you get a new version. In this case, you can do something more convenient than downloading a tar.gz-type archive: you can "clone" locally the remote Git repository you are interested in.

For example, go to the toy project page created for this course. There is a download button, but there is also a "Clone" button, which tells you what addresses you can use. Use the https address:

git clone https://gitlab.in2p3.fr/guez/toy.git

Note that this does not require any login as long as the owner of the project has declared the project to be public. You then get the complete repository, with all its history, not just the last version. You can use all the local Git commands on it: git log, git diff, git status etc. Note that these commands tell you about the local state of your repository, they do not connect to the remote repository.

If some time later you do not remember where you got this directory from, the following command will tell you:

git remote -v

When you want to get an up-to-date version of the code, assuming you did not make any change to it yourself, just type:

git pull