Repositories and Git

Abstract

You cannot build great code using Docker alone. You still need a convenient way to distribute your code, to revision control it, and to source control it. Years ago, in less technologically inclined working environments, you would FTP your code to your server. When you needed to make changes to the code, you made backup copies of it yourself. Two software developers could not work on the same script independently, because of the very real danger that they would overwrite each other's work when they copied the same script to the same server. The same went for working independently on complex systems, where the thread of files you edited eventually crossed paths with the thread of files your colleague edited. In my very first software development job, the question "Are you working on file so-and-so?" was a very real, and very often asked, question. It’s not that source control didn’t exist back then, it was just not widely adopted. Nowadays it is almost unthinkable that a company won't have source control. Online source control services provide the ability to automatically deploy code, a very valuable feature which we will also look at later in this book.