One of the most crucial commands in Git is git status. It tells you even more than its Subversion counterpart. In particular, besides the list of changed, deleted or untracked things in the filesystem, it will even tell you commands to use to get them committed or tracked. It will ignore any files or subdirectories (and the files and directories under them) that are listed in .gitignore.
Before beginning to perform fresh work in a project, you'll probably want the latest from origin master or, more frequently, from the master branch. In the subdirectory where you're planning to work, type:
$ git pull <branch>
Note that if the updates depend themselves on files in other subdirectories, you may wish to pick the subdirectory from which you do this carefully in order to get all necessary updates. Team members must be careful not to commit code that breaks the build or crashes on execution, you'd normally be safe to refresh your entire project.
You'll likely be doing the following to commit changes you've made whether by adding new files, modifying or deleting old ones. Using dot ('.') just ensures you cover the bases of all changes, but it's a dangerous shotgun. After you've reached a point you'd like to commit, do this:
| git add . | Adds everything new including scheduling modified files for commit* |
| git add <filename> | Adds just <filename> to the change list |
| git status | Will neatly list everything that's changed since the last commit |
| git commit | Commits what's been added to the status. |
| git commit <filename> | Commits just <filename> |
| git push <branch> | You might not wish to push just anywhere let alone all the way back to master |
* Beware: don't blindly shove everything into the repository! In Eclipse projects, for example, you do not want to put some files and subdirectories into the repository. It's very useful to try out git status before you perform a git commit in order to make certain what you're committing is what you intended. (This isn't different at all from Subversion.) And, if you keep tripping over files you never want tracked, add them to .gitignore.
The git push operation should require a branch name. For example, you might see:
$ git push No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing. Perhaps you should specify a branch such as 'master'. fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly error: failed to push some refs to 'git@swan-of-tuonela:project' $ git push origin master Counting objects: 30, done. Delta compression using up to 4 threads. Compressing objects: 100% (21/21), done. Writing objects: 100% (30/30), 4.04 MiB, done. Total 30 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0) To git@swan-of-tuonela:project * [new branch] master -> master
Once you've done this, Git remembers thereafter where to push to, but it's better form (because safer) to be explicit. The above will push your changes all the way to the master branch. See Git Scheme. This should not be a common operation.
Because of the way Git commands list commit comments, you should get into the habit of providing a short description on the commit in the first line, then elaborate on subsequent lines.
Sometimes, you screw the pooch. Here's how to fix it. The main thing to know is that git revert is NOT the same thing as svn revert, p4 revert, etc. So don't try it. Conceptually, we're "checking out" the latest version of what's committed to the repository.
| git checkout . | Everything from here down--dangerous of course |
| git checkout <filename> | Revert the named file |
When you no longer want a file in your project, you can remove it both from the filesystem and from the Git repository. You can also rename (or mv) a file.
| git rm <filename> | Remove the file from the repository and your project |
| git mv <filename> | A shorthand that does a mv, then git rm, then get add |
| git rm --cached <filename> | Unstage the file, but leave in your project (un-add the file) |
How to remove an unneeded branch:
| git branch -d <branchname> | Remove the local branch |
| git push remote :<branchname> | Remove the remote branch |
There are myriad Git commands, too many to list here. Fortunately, there are a great deal of references returned by Google. StackOverflow is an excellent forum for asking questions about Git.
This means to ignore, for purposes of git status git commit and git push any file you do not wish to be committed to the master (or any other) branch. Known files such as .project and whole subdirectories such has bin or build fall under this category.
These are recorded in a file at the root of the cloned project, .gitignore. It's a file you create and populate yourself with one file or subdirectory name per line.
See Git-Eclipse Peculiarities for more on this topic.