10 years ago Linus Torvalds started writing code for a new distributed version control system on a Sunday and only a mere few days later, the world was given the gift of Git. Git has helped teams big and small work faster while becoming more distributed and has left its mark with cheap local branching, easier code review, flexible work flows and so much more. Over the last decade Git has seen exponential growth and has become the most popular version control system today. Take a walk down memory lane to see how Git has evolved over the years and join us in celebrating the history of Git.
START
April 2005
Git project announced & becomes self-hosting
Created by Linus Torvalds
The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds began the development of Git on April 3, 2005 and announced the project on April 6. Just one day later the Git project was self-hosting.
April 2005
1st merge of multiple branches
infoTorvalds merges multiple branches for the first time and according to him, it came out correctly and 100% according to plan in very little time.
July 2005
Junio Hamano takes over maintenance of Git project
infoTorvalds has stated that one of the biggest successes in his life was actually recognizing how good a developer Junio Hamano was on Git, and trusting him enough to just ask if he would be willing to maintain the project.
December 2005
Git 1.0 released
infoBefore the 1.0 version, Git had been in production use by the Linux kernel team for a good amount of time. 1.0 is normally a significant milestone, but for Git it meant some documentation updates, clone/fetch enhancements and bug fixes.
May 2007
Linus Torvalds gives Git talk at Google
infoTorvalds' tech talk at Google covered his creation of the version control system, Git. He explains his love for distributed source control in general and highlights that with a distributed tool, no single place is vital to your data, centralized version control does not scale for Linux-kernel sized projects. Plus, distributed tools work offline, with full history.
February 2008
Original pull request
infoDuring its beta, GitHub released a feature called pull requests. At the time, pull requests were limited to notifying developers when they needed to pull changes from a forked repo, or to ask developers to pull. It could also notify someone that you pushed a new feature to a non-master branch.
April 2008
GitHub site launched
Founded by Tom Preston-Werner, Chris Wanstrath, and PJ Hyett
Development of the GitHub site began in October 2007 and was in beta until April, 2008. Today, GitHub is known for their open source community and hosts over 20.7 million repositories.
July 2008
Gist announced
infoGist is a simple way to share code snippets and pastes with others. Upon their creation, gists expanded on pastebins (public place to paste source code) by adding version control for code snippets, easy forking, SSL encryption for private pastes and the ability to be pushed and pulled using Git (since each Gist has its own repository.)
"Git Download" Keyword Search Trend over Time
January 2010
Git installations skyrocket
infoInstallations on Debian Linux show that developers were taking huge notice of Git and starting to make the switch from SVN, CVS and Mercurial.
April 2010
Sourcetree founded by Steve Streeting
infoSourcetree is a free Git and Mercurial client for Mac or Windows. Atlassian acquired Sourcetree in October 2011. It allows developers to manage and interface with multiple Git and Mercurial repositories visually through a client instead of the command line.
August 2010
Pull requests 2.0
infoPull requests were revamped to not only take into account what a developer would like pulled, but also where those changes needed to be applied. They now included a discussion view that allowed a conversation to happen about the changes right in the pull request. The discussion view showed all pull request related activity – the actual pull request, push follow up commits, or commit notes so you could watch changes evolve over time.
October 2010
Git-annex launches
Large Git file management without checking file contents into Git
Git-annex is useful when dealing with files larger than Git can easily handle, whether due to limitations in memory, time, or disk space. The contents of annexed files are not stored in Git, only the names of the files and some other metadata remain there. Git-annex is free software, written in Haskell.
January 2011
Git installations surpass all other version control systems
infoOver the course of a year, Git installations on Debian Linux managed to surpass Bzr, CVS, Mercurial, SVN & Darcs going from 5,000 submitters to 35,000.
September 2011
Gitlab founded
infoDmitriy Zaporozhets and Valeriy Sizov founded Gitlab in Ukraine. Originally, Gitlab was a free and open source software, but in July 2013, Gitlab split into a community edition & an enterprise edition.
Git MeetUp Groups around the World
- 35 Groups
- 6,640 Members
- 806 Interested
- 33 Cities
- 19 Countries
October 2011
Bitbucket adds support for Git
info1 year after Bitbucket joined Atlassian, it added Git support. Today, Bitbucket is used by professional software teams to host, manage, and share Git and Mercurial repositories in the cloud. It is used by companies worldwide such as Salesforce, Tesla & PayPal.
May 2012
Atlassian releases Stash 1.0
infoStash joins the Atlassian family as an on-premise Git repository management tool that is secure, fast and enterprise-grade. Today, Stash is known as the only collaborative Git solution that massively scales and is used worldwide by companies such as Netflix, Nordstrom & NASA.
May 2012
Bitbucket exceeds half a million repos managed
infoGit was seeing such exponential growth that Bitbucket's repos were 40% Git just 6 months after Bitbucket introduced Git support to its previously Mercurial-only offering.
Git Usage by Developers over Time
March 2014
Git 2.0 released
infoThis major release of Git involved some default changes, one of the largest being the gitpush default behavior. It originally was set to matching, but with 2.0, the default changed to simple, meaning it would push only your current branch to the remote branch with the same name. Other notable changes were the git add path now equating to git add -A path, git svn default prefixes changed and now placed remote-tracking branches under refs/remotes/origin (instead of directly under refs/remote), and non breaking changes got grouped by demand.
June 2014
Developers usage of Git surpasses SVN
Yearly Eclipse Community Survey calls out Git as the #1 Code management tool
Every June the Eclipse Community Survey polls software developers to learn more about the tools they are using. 2014 was Git's year and it was finally announced that Git's usage by developers had surpassed SVN as the #1 code management tool. My how far Git had come in 9 years' time.
March 2015
Snippets launch
infoAtlassian launched Snippets for Bitbucket as a quick and easy way to share code, notes, and pastes with your team.
October 2016
Bitbucket Supports Git LFS
infoDevelopers using large binary files and rich media can now collaborate on 80+ file types of any size and store all their files in one place. Git LFS stores your large files externally and keeps your actual Git repository lightweight, resulting in faster cloning and fetching times.
