Github Gist: Versioning For Pasted Code

Posted by Werner Schuster on Jul 24, 2008

Sections

Process & Practices,

Development

Topics

Collaboration ,

Ruby

Tags

Collaborative Technologies ,

git ,

github ,

Source Control

Github just added another service: Gist, which was demoed at RubyFringe. Gist is basically a paste tool, similar to Pastie. Paste tools make it easy to share text or code - the user pastes the text into a text field on the site which returns a URL under which this text is accessible.

Gist works the same way - except with a twist: the pasted text ends up in a git repository, which is accessible via a git clone URL - it can be checked out with a git client program. Not just that, the connection works both ways: pushing a commit back to the repository makes the changes (and added files) accessible in the Gist web interface, which also allows to edit text files. Gist allows to start off from a pasted bit of text or code and collaborate over the net, either using a web interface or git tools.

Bryan Liles created a screencast demoing the Gist workflow and features. The screencast shows how to paste snippets then use the generated git clone URL to access the pasted code using command line git  and then pushing a modified version back.

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