Handy git tips

I like the deep-diving and condensed courses of Egghead. I thought I was quite familiar with git, but I found some really handy tips in Productive git for developers.

git add

Adding files can be space separated:

git add fileA fileB

Merging main/develop into feature branch

• if other developers work on the same branch: git merge main (creates an extra merge commit)

• if it’s your own personal branch: git rebase main (commit hashes are rewritten)

  • but… if that branch already exists remotely you need to force-push your changes, so this can only be done when you’re sure you are the only one working on this branch. Force pushing with extra checks for safety can be done with: git push --force-with-lease.

Squashing commits before pushing with git rebase interactive

Copy the pointer of the commit after which you want to start rebasing:

git rebase -i 2e57685

Squash commits with fixup

git add .
git commit --fixup 3e4556
# or
git commit --fixup :/update
# (if update was part of the commit message where we started fixup)

Amend

I always did git commit --amend -m "New message". But just git commit --amend happens to open your text editor to change the commit message, which is handy if you just want to fix a typo in a long commit message.

If you have staged files when running amend to can be merged in the previous commit as well.

Reset

git reset HEAD~ removes the last commit and puts the files changed of that last commit in the staging area.

If commits already have been pushed, use revert instead of reset as this doesn’t modify the git history but just adds an extra commit to undo the changes.

Stash

I’ve written about git stash before. But I forgot about this one:

git stash pop removes the entry from stash, while git stash apply keeps the stash entry.