Git cheat sheet

Git is distributed version control system It is very powerful tool and has a lot of features. Also there’re a lot GUI tools for working with git. But in this post I’ll show how to work with git from terminal (console) in Linux or using git-bash in Windows.

The list of commands will be updated periodically.

Identifying yourself

To add user name and email globally:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email [email protected]

To specify text editor:

git config --global core.editor vim

To add specific user or/and email for the project (global config will be overridden). From the project folder run the specified above commands without --global:

git config user.name "Holms Doe"
git config --global user.email [email protected]

Rename a branch

Let’s assume we have a branch named Issue-1 and we want to rename it to Issue1. To do so just use the following command:

git branch -m Issue1

Delete branch

To delete branch which has already been merged:

git branch -d Issue1

Currently checked out branch could not be deleted.

To delete branch which has NOT been merged yet:

git branch -D Issue1

To delete remote branch:

git push origin --delete Issue5

Undo last commit

In case when we need to modify the last commit, e.g. to add missed file(-s) or to change the commit message we can use the following command:

git commit --amend

If we haven’t made any changes since last commit this command will change only the commit message. To add missed files to the last commit:

1. add missed files to the staging git add missed_file_name.txt
2. use git commit --amend command

After modifying the last local commit into such way, we won’t be able to push these changes to the remote branch. Changes will be rejected with the error like:

! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:oneils/git-demo.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind
hint: its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes (e.g.
hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Force push to the remote branch

One of the approaches to push rejected commits to remote is to force push to the remote branch into the following way:

git push origin Issue2 --force

This will push the local branch to remote and will override all changes into the remote branch. This command should be used very carefully.