Build It In

Log data, configuration files, medication plans – several forms of data require some kind of version control. If you're building an application that manages version-sensitive information, you might be wondering if it is possible to simply integrate Git rather than painstakingly implementing a version management system yourself. Git is an obvious choice for many scenarios. For instance, developers use version management for their source code anyway and are already very familiar with Git. Git is totally reliable and meets professional requirements. This article outlines some of the options for integrating Git with your homegrown code.

Build It In

The most direct way to build Git into your application is to launch it directly. This method can be cumbersome in the long run, but it is easy to describe conceptually. Most programming languages offer an interface that will start external programs or shell scripts. In Go, for example, you can use the exec.Command() function, and the Python equivalent is os.system(). This trick of launching an external program will allow you to call Git directly. Listing 1 shows an example in Go, but the steps in other languages are similar. In line 9, the program first calls the git init /tmp/logs command to create a new Git repository in the /tmp/logs/ directory. The exec.Command() function expects the individual Git options as a separate parameter. In many other languages (including Python), you first need to assemble the complete Git command in a single string.

From line 14 onward, the program in Listing 1 uses functions from the Go standard library to create a text file named log.txt. Line 18 calls the git -C /tmp/logs add log.txt command to add the file to the staging area. The git -C /tmp/logs commit -am "System started" command then triggers a commit. (A more practical program might use a commit message in the message variable.)

[...]