Any programming project — including Drupal projects — should use a version control system. My favorite such system is git. If you haven’t tried it I recommend that you learn all about it at the tutorial section of github, or from Peepcode’s git screencast.

Assuming that you understand the basics of git, let’s apply it to a Drupal project. The simplest strategy is to create a single git repository that holds everything in your project. You download Drupal core and modules (using FTP, the Update Status module, or drush) and you check them into git as you install them. Your custom changes get checked into the same git repository.

(Paraphrased from Long Nguyen’s guide to checking out projects from GitHub — which is excellent, except that Long uses the name “long” for too many different things, making the code hard for mere mortals to read.)

Suppose you would like to work on the open-source Insoshi project.

I’m switching all my personal projects to git from Subversion. After watching the Peepcode git screencast, Subversion feels oh-so-2002 and I can’t wait to bury it forever.

First we have to get git running on my Ubuntu server. I tried

sudo apt-get install git-core #do not do this!

but that led to trouble down the line.