With traditional hosting providers, the standard method for connecting to your server and uploading your files was to use File Transfer Protocol (FTP). You would connect using any standard FTP software and push a copy of your files to the server and those changes would be reflected instantly online when accessing your website URL. With cloud-based hosting providers, the standard typically is to use the Git source control. Git is a source control technology that allows you to track changes and history with your project source code as well as provide an easy-use means of collaboration with multiple developers. The most popular Git online code repository provider currently is www.GitHub.com.

For the purposes of this chapter, we are going to use Git in order to track our application project source code as well as the method of pushing our code up to the various cloud-hosting providers. When you push code using Git, you are effectively transferring all or only the changed version of your code to an online repository (like www.GitHub.com).

Git and www.GitHub.com are both topics that are relatively easy to get into but can seem intimidating and complex. If you're unfamiliar with Git and/or GitHub.com, I would strongly suggest taking a moment to get acquainted by checking out the following guides:

The guides will take you through the following concepts:

Once you have your project source code configured as a local Git repository and all of the code committed to the master branch, proceed to the following sections.