git — A Compulsory developer Tool

I’ve been approached several time with similar question which says “I want to start contributing to open source. Can you help me?” Answering the same thing to everyone gets difficult & that’s why, I’m writing to help the community by my prior experience.

As we all know, Git is a necessity for developers & it’s also a boon for all of us. But How much deep understanding of Git is required before starting the open source contribution? Answers may vary with different person & I’ll share my view on it. If you haven’t installed git yet, check the steps here.

This blog covers: Basics of Git, Reset the files,Review history,Branching,Synchronize Changes,Save fragments,Amending & squashing the commits.

Basics of Git

Clone the repository: git clone [URL] Downloads a project and its entire version history.

Adding files to staging area: git add [filename] or git add . for all files. This command updates the index using the current content found in the working tree, to prepare the content staged for the next commit.

Status of repository: git status This command lists all new or modified files to be committed.

Commit the files: git commit -m [descriptive message] : This command records snapshots permanently in version history.

Reset the files

git reset changes, at minimum, where the current branch (HEAD) is pointing & it can be soft/hard both.

git reset -- soft : uncommit changes, changes is left staged (index).

git reset -- hard : uncommit + unstage + delete changes, nothing left.

Review History

• git log : Lists version history for the current branch
• git diff [first-branch] [second-branch] : Shows the content differences between two branches.
• git diff : This command show the file differences that are not staged yet. git diff --staged : It shows file differences between staging and the last file version.

log details small example

git diff & git diff — — staged

Branching

• git branch : Lists all local branches in the current repository.
• git branch [branch-name] : Creates a new branch.
• git checkout [branch-name] : Switches to the specified branch and updates the working directory.
• git checkout -b [branch-name] : Creates a new branch with specified name & switches to it.
• git merge [branch] : Combines the specified branch’s history into the current branch. Be-aware! You must checkout the required branch before merging.
• git branch -d [branch-name] : Deletes the specified branch.

List, checkout & merge branch

Create a new branch & delete it.

Synchronize Changes

• git remote -v : Displays all the remotes added to the repository. If you’re forking & cloning the repo, you’ll origin pointing towards your forked project.
• git remote add upstream [URL] : Adds a remote named upstream which points to the specified Url.
• git fetch upstream : Downloads all the changes from specified remote.
• git rebase -i upstream/master : Perform it after fetching the code. It rebases i.e merges all the code to the local branch in a interactive way.
• git push [remote-name] [branch-name] : Uploads all local branch commits to github.
• git pull [remote-name] [branch-name] : Downloads all changes from remote specified & incorporates changes.

Save Fragments

• git stash : Temporarily stores all modified tracked files.
• git stash list : List all stashed changesets.
• git stash drop [n] : Deletes the nth changesets.

Example of stash commands

Some difficult commands

Amend the last commit: If you want to change the actual content of your last commit, first make the changes you think you forgot, stage those changes, and the subsequent git commit --amend replaces that last commit with your new, improved commit.

Squashing the commits: it take a series of commits and squash them down into a single commit with the interactive rebasing tool. Follow the order:

git log before rebasing

git rebase -i HEAD~N : It opens an interactive rebasing window with last N commits on the current branch.

1st interactive screen

Leave the first line as it is & change pick to squash in rest of the other lines and SAVE+Close the file.

changed pick to squash

It again opens up a file with commit message, Change the message as you want and SAVE+Close the file.

After squashing the two commits

References: Udacity course , Short interactive course & Git documentation.

Thanks for reading! Be sure to click claps below to recommend this article if you liked it.

You can connect with me on Github, Twitter, Linkedin :)

Check out all the top articles at blog.mindorks.com