git — A Compulsory developer Tool

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MindOrks

5 min readJun 18, 2018

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.

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.

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.

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: