GIT - 2 What is Git?

Git is a distributed — also called decentralized — version control system. Distributed means there is no single, mandatory central authority that owns the project history: every developer who clones the repository receives a complete copy of all the files and the entire history of changes that have ever been made to them.

Distributed, but usually with a central server

Even though Git itself is distributed, most teams in practice still choose to designate one central server as the official home of the project. That server — typically hosted on GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket or a self-hosted instance — acts as the canonical reference where everyone synchronizes their work. It is not required by Git, but it makes collaboration and backups much easier to organize.

One of the biggest practical benefits of Git being distributed is that the vast majority of operations happen locally. Only a handful of commands actually require a network connection — typically the ones that exchange data with the central server such as clone, fetch, pull and push. Everything else runs entirely on your machine.

This means you can keep working productively even when you are completely disconnected from any network: creating branches, committing changes, viewing history, comparing versions and reverting work all happen offline. When connectivity comes back, you simply synchronize with the central server.

Because operations are local, they are also extremely fast. There is no round-trip to a remote server for routine actions, so commands return almost instantly even on large projects with deep histories. Combined with its flexibility and robustness, this performance is one of the main reasons Git has become the most popular version control system in the world.