Using Git
Setup
Firstly, you will need to have installed git on your local machine.
Set your name and email address using the following commands, commits are associated by these credentials:
git config --global user.name "Support"
git config --global user.email [email protected]
Cloning a repo
To start using a public repository, you can clone a repo to your local machine using either HTTPS or SSH. To get the full path navigate to the repo in GitHub or GitLab.
git clone https://github.com/path/to/repo
git clone ssh://[email protected]/path/to/repo.git
Git add, commit, and push
Once you have made a change to the source code in your repos directory, use the git add command:
git add . # adds all changed files
git add filename # adds only specified file
git add * # wildcard, used for *.txt
Commit changes as often as possible and provide useful commit messages for the community:
git commit -m "Updated README.md"
When you are ready to publish your new code, push it to the remote repo specifying the remote branch:
git push origin master
Check your changes
It's very important to know what you are committing and make sure what you think you are pushing is what you will push to the remote branch.
Git status checks working tree status - that is which files can be committed:
git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
# Changes to be committed:
# (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
#
# new file: .gitignore
# new file: example2.txt
#
Git diff does a comparison of the files in your repo since the last commit, and shows the differences:
git diff
diff --git a/example2.txt b/example2.txt
index e69de29..3b18e51 100644
--- a/example2.txt
+++ b/example2.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+hello world
Branches
Ideally you would never be pushing to the master branch directly and instead branching off from the master, committing, and pushing your changes, then merging back to the master branch.
Check existing branches:
git branch -a
Create a new branch and switch to it:
git branch newbranch
git checkout newbranch
You can then push the new branch to the repo instead of to the master branch:
git push origin newbranch
First switch back to the master branch:
git checkout master
Use git diff to show us the changes:
git diff master newbranch
Once we're happy we can merge the changes and push the changes:
git merge newbranch
git push origin master
Pulling
Use git pull to fetch and incorporate changes from the remote repository into your current branch:
git pull
Although Git is very good at combining multiple changes, running a git pull can sometimes result in merge conflicts depending on how far behind your branch is:
Auto-merging example2.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in README.md
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.
If you open the offending file in a text editor, you'll find an indication of the bits that are different, something like this:
<<<<<<< HEAD
hello world
=======
Hello World!
>>>>>>> 031389f2cd2acde08e32f0beb084b2f7c3257fff
Edit the bits from <<<<<<< to >>>>>>> to make the file just as you want it.
Then the usual add, commit, push:
git add -A (add all files/changes to files)
git commit -m "Fix merge conflicts"
git push
Forking
When you don't have permission to push to a repository directly, you will likely want to Fork the repository and start a new pull request to apply your suggested changes. Typically this would need to be approved before being merged into the original branch.
First look at the currently configured remote repositories:
git remote -v
origin https://github.com/path/to/repo.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/path/to/repo.git (push)
Now we will specify a new remote repository, we will call it upstream:
git remote add upstream https://github.com/path/to/origional/repo.git
Have a look at the now configured remote repositories:
git remote -v
origin https://github.com/path/to/repo.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/path/to/repo.git (push)
upstream https://github.com/path/to/origional/repo.git (fetch)
upstream https://github.com/path/to/origional/repo.git (push)
Now we will fetch respective commits from the upstream/master:
git fetch upstream
> remote: Counting objects: 75, done.
> remote: Compressing objects: 100% (53/53), done.
> remote: Total 62 (delta 27), reused 44 (delta 9)
> Unpacking objects: 100% (62/62), done.
> From https://github.com/path/to/origional/repo.git
> * [new branch] master -> upstream/master
On your local master branch:
git checkout master
Merge the commits from the upstream/master, this will leave all local changes untouched:
git merge upstream/master
Merge made by the 'recursive' strategy.
path/to/changed/file.md | 148 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
path/to/another/changed/file.md | 1 +
2 files changed, 149 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 path/to/changed/file.md
Remember to push your changes to your remote origin:
git push origin