Git Crash Course and Cheat Sheet

Submitted by Kevin Kleinfelter on Sun, 11/06/2011 - 11:47

I'm going to ignore most distributed aspects of git in this posting. This content addresses solo developer projects. Note that CWD is an abbreviation for your current working directory.

I use git on my laptop for most work, and when I have a 'milestone product,' I push that to my server.

To Do This Type This
Create a repo in CWD git init
Add content of CWD to git's tracking (if CWD is repo root or descendant) git add .
Put all tracked content of CWD and below into repo git commit
Put and track content of updated/new files in CWD and below into repo (combines add and commit) git commit -a
Status git status
Copy a project from a master repo git clone url_goes_here
Put your changes back in the master git push
Discover what you SHOULD have added git diff
Show what will get committed git diff --cached
Show what will get commited (alt.) git status
Abandon (completely destroy) a branch git branch -D branch_name
Show commit history [with metrics] git log [--stat]
Compare two branches git diff master..my_branch
Compare CWD with a version git diff some_branch
Show what changed in this_dir since last commit git diff HEAD -- ./this_dir
Do a file system based clone git clone /path/to/master/for/project myrepo_dir
Push a local repo to a NEW remote 'master' repo git clone --bare repo_original repo_bare

  • In your commit message, the first line MUST be a summary line.
  • One-time tasks, after you install git, before you use it for the first time
  • Note that adding a file is not permanent. If you add+edit+commit+edit2+commit2, your file won't be included in commit2 (unless you do a "commit -a" to add+commit).

Basic workflow. Suppose you're about to implement a feature you'll call Feature-X:

  • cd somewhere_in_your_git-enabled_project
  • git branch Feature-X
    • This creates the branch, but does not make it your active branch.
  • git checkout Feature-X
    • This makes Feature-X your active branch.
  • Lotsa editing
  • git commit -a
  • test and edit some more
  • git commit-a
  • git checkout master
    • Makes 'master' your active branch.
  • git merge Feature-X
  • If the merge doensn't go smoothly:
    • git diff
    • More editing
    • git commit -a
  • Regression testing, and maybe more commits.
  • git branch -d Feature-X

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