It is still under construction and content may change. Do not rely on the information on this page.
This is not intended to be an exhaustive list of git operations. See the documentation for that.
Basic Operations
Configure your global git settings
Running these commands will setup your global git settings. You should obviously use your own contact details. Should you wish to change your details, you can edit the '~/.gitconfig' file for global settings, or edit '.git/config' to change settings on a particular repo.
git-config --global user.name "John Q. Public"
git-config --global user.email "john.public@example.com"
git-config --global color.diff auto
git-config --global color.status auto
git-config --global color.branch auto
Display current branch in bash
If you work with branches, and you should, this setting helps you keep track of which branch you are in at a given time. If you are in a git working directory, it shows the current branch as part of the prompt:
[user@host directory-name {master}]$
To enable this, add these lines as a function to ~/.bashrc:
if [ -z "`declare -p | grep __git_ps1`" ]; then
export PS1="[\u@\h \W\$(git-branch 2> /dev/null | grep -e '\* ' | sed 's/^..\(.*\)/ {\1}/')]\$ "
fi
To activate bash configuration changes, run source ~/.bashrc.
Initialize a new repo
mkdir repo && cd repo && git init
Once you've created a repo, you'll find a '.git' folder inside it. What you essentially have at this point is a bare repo -- a repository with the git configs, but no actual files contained in the repository. Now let's create a file and tell git that we want it to be part of our repo. From the repo directory (not the .git directory), type:
echo "Blah" > test.txt
git add test.txt
We can then commit the changes by typing:
git commit test.txt
Another way of committing all the changes (without having to specify all the files that have changed) is to type:
git commit -a
Either way, it will bring up whichever editor you have defined in $EDITOR and allow you to write a commit log message explaining the changes you've made. A commit log message usually consists of:
- a one-line summary of your changes
- a blank line
- one or more additional lines with more detail. These lines are optional.
You can always check the status of your current repo by typing
git status
Developer Operations
Create a new local branch
git checkout -b <branch>
Push and create a new remote branch from an existing local branch of the same name
git push origin <branch>
Switch to a branch that was pushed remotely
Use:
git branch -a
to determine the name of the remote branch you want to work on. Remote branches will be preceded by origin/. Then use this to switch to it:
git checkout --track -b <branch> origin/<branch>
Maintainer Operations
Remove a remote branch
Assuming you had a branch named blah on the remote server, you could remove it by typing:
git push origin :blah
Apply mailed git patch
git am <file>