miniGit

A Mini Version Control System

Authors: Collin Sinclair and Linnea Wolniewicz

This is a working miniature version control system. It creates a local repository, .minigit, and allows you to interact directly with your repository through the terminal. You may add and remove files from your current working directory, commit changes and checkout previous commits.

Installation

After cloning the repository, compile the program with C++17 or later. (e.g. type g++ -std=c++17 driver.cpp miniGit.cpp -o miniGit into a terminal that is set in the clone directory).

Use

To run miniGit, use ./miniGit (or any other name you chose at compile time). You will then be greeted by a menu of options, where you can add or remove files in your current working directory, commit changes locally, and checkout older file versions from previous commits. If you find a bug, enter debug mode with menu option 8127 for more detailed information (you can subsequently leave debug mode with menu option 3850).

Initialization

When you first start the program with ./miniGit, you will be prompted to initialize a repository.

• If this is your first time using miniGit in this directory, the program will create a hidden sub-folder called .minigit where it will put versioned files as you update and commit components of your repository.
• If you have used miniGit in this directory before, you will be prompted to choose between resetting the repository or exiting the program. Warning: if you choose to reset the repository, your previous versioned files (everything in the ./minigit directory) will be permanently deleted.

Note: at this stage of development, miniGit does not function across uses. Once the program terminates, version tracking stops and cannot be recovered.

Add/Remove

Once the repository is initialized, you will be prompted to choose from several menu options.

• Menu option 1, "Add a file", will instruct miniGit to begin tracking files in your working directory or deeper. The same file cannot be added twice.
• Menu option 2, "Remove a file" will instruct miniGit to stop tracking files in your current working directory or deeper. Removing a file from miniGit will not modify or remove it from your working directory - it will simply stop being tracked by miniGit. A removed file can always be added again.

Commit

After adding files to miniGit or modifying already-added files, you can choose to commit them with menu option 3. Upon a commit, miniGit will check for any changes in your added files. If it finds changes, it will automatically assign an updated version number to the changed files and save them to the ./minigit directory. You may access any version of an added file at any time manually by accessing the ./minigit directory. Note: you may have to manually remove the version number ("_v##") from the file extension to open the file properly.

Checkout

If you'd like to restore the files in your working directory to a previous version, use menu option 4 to check out a previous commit. This will replace the files in your current working directory with copies of the same files as they were when you submitted the specified commit. Warning: any uncommitted changes will be lost upon checkout - it is always a good idea to commit your changes before checking out a previous commit if you wish to save your changes.

Quit

Menu option 5 will exit miniGit. This will delete the repository structure and disable you from checking out previous commits from within the program. Quitting miniGit does not erase any files in your working directory, nor does it erase any versioned files from commits you made during use of the program. All version files will still be available in the ./minigit directory.

Future and Feedback

In the future, we will consider adding additional functionality to miniGit such as branching, diff and status, friendly checkouts, and more. If you find any bugs or have suggestions, please submit an issue here. We are very proud of this project and hope you enjoy it as well!