Git Tutorial for Hackerspace

Terminology:

Forking: make a copy of one person's repository on your own GitHub (or other git service) account

Branching: make a copy of the base branch (what you're currently on) into another branch and modify files as you please, not affecting the base branch

Pull request: sending your changes to your own repository back to the original repository that you forked from

Handy git commands:

git status

• displays the status of your local copy from git (untracked/tracked files, modified files, deleted files, etc)

git add <filename>

• add a change to a file to be tracked by git
• Useful modifier: git add -A
  • Add all untracked changes/files to git

git commit -m <message>

• commit the changes into a local commit
• for multiple line commit messages, remove the -m and message arguments
• cool trick to add new changes to your last commit is to use the --amend tag

git push

• pushes to your most recently pushed to branch, or master if that doesnt exist
• Longer form: git push origin master

git branch <name>

• makes a new git branch with that name

git checkout <name>

• switch to a previously created branch
• can save a step if you want to create a new branch and switch to it using git checkout -b <branch name>

Other useful commands:

git reset (DANGEROUS!!)

• reset commit history to a certain time (time travel!)
• number of different options (--hard or --soft or a commit SHA)
• ex. git commit --hard HEAD or git commit --hard de9db22e60294b35eeb8d756897f4a5a330558a5