🛂Git Control & Unity
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Introduction
You generally do not want your Unity Project to be the root of your repository. Read our example and its steps and understand why. You do want your repository to have a folder within it that will be your Unity Project root. This simplifies other aspects later ... read on to better understand.
The concept of source control is critically important for game development. The idea is simply that not only is your source code "backed up" but every change made to your source is tracked and managed and can be reviewed, compared or even rolled back.
In times past you would have needed a paid service such as Perforce, Plastic SCM, Team Foundation or similar. These premium tools do still exist and are a fine option, however, several free options are also available. Git or more specifically GitHub has become increasingly friendly to use, integrates with many build services such as Unity Cloud Build and has free levels of use.
This article will describe the steps required to set up a new repository for use with Unity and discuss the integration Git has with Visual Studio and other tools.
Git Organization
Before we do anything let's talk about how you log into GitHub and how you manage your Git repositories.
If you are building a game you either are now or very likely will soon be working with others. Even if you never plan to work with others you very likely want to have a separate life from your game development work. For that reason, I suggest you create a Git Organization and that it's under the organization that you create your game development repositories.
Creating an organization isn't hard, it's free and you can convert personal accounts into organizations if you should need them.
Installing GitHub Desktop
While not technically required if you are new to Git or just not a fan of command-line tools, GitHub Desktop is a free and easy way of managing your repositories. This tool will help you connect to repositories, download repositories, and push changes to repositories from a simple desktop app.
Creating a Repository
Your first step should be to create your repository, I prefer to do this from the Git Website so I show those steps here.
Step 1
Navigate to your organization's home page. This is usually just gethub.com followed by your organization name. For example, this is the URL for Heathen Engineering's organization
Step 2
As the owner of an organization you will see a simple green button near the top labelled "New"; click that.
Be sure your repo is "Private" especially if you will have 3rd party code in your repo. Otherwise, you could leak your code and the code you licensed from others.
Step 3
Name your repository something clever ... remember this won't be the name or folder that appears in Unity Hub. This will be the parent folder within which your Unity Project and any other control artefacts will reside.
Heathen usually names this for the project code name, not the game's name itself; you'll see why shortly
Be sure to set the Add .gitignore field to Unity this will give you a handy ignore file to stop Unity from bloating your repository with generated files.
Step 4
Open your repository In GitHub Desktop by pressing the Green button and selecting Open with GitHub Desktop
Follow the on-screen instructions which are simply having you select a location on your local disk to put the repository.
and click Show in Explorer
Copy the folder path, you will need it for the next step
Step 5
Now we create the Unity Project.
Open Unity Hub click new project as you normally would, and select your engine version and template if you like. Then select the folder where the project should be placed and paste it into the folder path we copied from Step 4 above.
Step 6
Now that we have our clean project set up we need to move the .gitignore file into it so it doesn't make a huge mess when we first check in.
To do this, open the project folder and navigate up one till you see the .gitignore file
We want to move this into the Unity Project folder, so in my case, I would simply drag and drop it in the A Game folder.
Step 7
With that, we are done!
You can pop back over to GitHub Desktop and see that it has detected all the changes made by adding the Unity Project.
All that is left to do is to add a summary and description to the change and commit to the main, using the text box in the lower-left corner of the GitHub Desktop screen.
Don't forget to click the Push origin button after committing.
GitHub works in two stages, commit and then push.
Once complete you can see that your changes appear in the repository as seen on the web
Tips
You will notice that the game project folder is a child of the repository. This means we can add other files and folders outside the project here.
That could be simple documentation, concept documents and artwork or even other Unity Projects as you experiment with your game design.
This repository represents your game project not just the specific Unity Project you are working on at the moment.
Visual Studio
Did you know Microsoft owns Git?
Well, now you do, and they build Visual Studio, the default and hands down best IDE for working with Unity ... in my opinion anyway.
Visual Studio will detect that this project is part of a Git repository and will let you work with Git right in your IDE so really you don't require GitHub Desktop but its nice if you want to control more than just your scripts.
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