I'm new to source control; in the past, I've manually backed up copies of files and made changes on clones then transferred changes manually to master files once debugged. I realize this is similar to how branches work with Git repositories, however I've never used one.
I downloaded Git and made an account on GitLab, and started a new project. My site is hosted on a local server and my files are saved locally. How do I connect these files to a Git repository and continue developing with branches?
To register a project as a local Git repository the first thing you need to do is perform the following command at your project root:
git init
This will create a .git folder at your project root and will allow you to start using Git in that repository.
If you want to "push" your local Git repository to a remote Git server (in your case, to GitLab), you'll need to perform the following command first:
git remote add origin <Repository_Location>
You can call origin whatever you like, really, but origin is the standard name for Git remote repositories. <Repository_Location> is the URL to your remote repository. For example, if I had a new project called MyNewProject that I wanted to push to GitLab, I'd perform:
git remote add origin https://gitlab.com/Harmelodic/MyNewProject.git
You can then "push" your changes from your local machine to your remote repo using the following command:
git push origin <branch_name>
where branch name is the name of the branch you want to push, e.g. master.
You can find a good beginners guide to Git here.