Strap in folks, this is a nerdy one. If you’re not already a little aware of the role of Git in your life, there’s a good chance that this article isn’t going to work for you. While I will make sure I anchor our conversation about Git Subtree’s use in my WordPress development with a little context of what Git is, it’ll be minimal. This is not a “Git” tutorial, it’s pretty explicitly a “git subtree” tutorial.
I don’t think git subtree is right for everyone. I often don’t even think its right for me. But when certain realities our my work organizational structure and history demanded that I learn how to use it for WordPress development, I did. And so my goal here is to explain why Git Subtree was necessary for my (much loved) Git Push to WP Engine deployment system. And because that’s pretty closely a map off all the parts of git subtree, I think this may help a few non-WordPress folks too. Lets get to it!
What’s Git?
In short, Git is a version control software. What that means is that I can use Git to figure out the history of my code, what its status was on a particular day, who was responsible to which changes on a specific line of code, etc.
We’ll assume that if you understand that, you’ll also familiar with the basic patterns of Git. That you understand you git pull to receive changes to a local copy of a project, and git push them share them with others on Github, Bitbucket, Gitlab, etc.
Why use distributed version control?
Strictly and importantly Git isn’t just “version control software,” it is distributed version control software. That’s got a lot of advantages over its centralized alternatives, like Subversion. By being distributed people can work asynchronously, and generally not have too many complication to fix simultaneous-file-change problems, aka “merge conflicts 👻.” (Don’t worry, they still happen though. And most developers fear them at least a little. Even me.)
