Git commands which you should really know

Git is now ten years old. More and more developers get lost when have to deal with CVS or Subversion as first SCM they learnt was git. But in daily work I see many people limited to very basic use of it ;(

There is a lot of commands and external plugins for git. I do not want to mention them but rather concentrate on ones installed as part of git package. And only those which I think EVERY developer using git should know that they exist and how to use them.

Dealing with repositories

Dealing with other repo is easy set: “pull” to merge changes (“fetch” if you only want to have them locally), “push” to send them out. “git remote” is useful too.

Branching your changes

Branching is easy and there is a lot of articles how to do it. Basically “git branch” to see which one you use, “git branch -a” to check which are available and “git checkout” to grab code from one.

Looking at changes

Checking changes is next step. “git diff” with all variants like checking local not committed changes against local repo, comparing to other branches, checking differences between branches etc. “git log -p” to check what was changed in earlier commits.

Then goes “status” to see which local files are changed/added/removed and need attention. And “add”, “rm” and finally “commit” to get all of them sorted out.

Lot of people ends here. The problem appears when they get patches…

Handling single patches

So how to deal with patches in git world? You can of course do “patch -p1 <some.patch” and take care of adding removing files and doing commit. but git has a way for it too.

To generate patch you can use “git diff” and store output into file. But this will lack author information and description. So it is better to commit changes and then use “git format-patch” to export what you did into file. Such file can be attached to bug tracker, sent by email, put online etc. Importing it is simple: “git am some.patch” and if it applies then it is merged like you would do local commit.

There are other ways probably too. Quilt, stgit etc. But this one is using basic git commands.

And I still remember days when I thought that git and me do not match ;D

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