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Git Fundamentals

Markdown Formatting

*.md files indicate markdown formatting on render of content: https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet

Completing Tasks with Git

  • How do I clone a repository created / existing on GitHub on my local computer?
git clone git@github.com/$USERNAME/$REPONAME.git [$LOCALREPONAME]

This command will clone the most recent files and complete history of the repository to a local directory (can specify a name different than the repository name with $LOCALREPONAME.

  • To work in your cloned repository, you will need to change into the directory ($LOCALREPONAME) that was created by the clone operation. A nice walk-through of this process is summarized in GitBashFolders.

  • How do I figure out what files in my local repository have changed or their status in the git commit process?

git status

This will show files that are not tracked (not under git version control), modified (changed since last committed version), and files that are queued for commit.

  • How do I see what has changed in a file since it was last committed?
git diff

Can I look at a diff for a local file compared to a remote file (e.g., something on origin)?

# yes!
git diff $REMOTE/$BRANCH:$REMOTE/PATH/FILE LOCALPATH/FILE
  • How do I queue files to be added / removed in the next commit?
git add $FILENAME
git rm $FILENAME
  • How do I commit changes to the repository version history on my local computer?
git commit

✨ Shortcut ✨ If you want to commit changes for all modified files that have been previously added to the repository, you can add an commit using the following command: git commit -am 'commit message'.

  • How do I send or get committed changes from GitHub (your default remote origin)?
git push
git pull
  • How do I figure out what remote version of my repository are linked to my local repository?
git remote

You can add, remove and modify remote URLs with this same command.

What should a git commit message contain?

This is a matter of personal preference and might be dictated by the project you are working on, but I like to adhere to the following commit message template:

# If applied, this commit will…


# Explain why this change is being made

# Provide links to any relevant tickets, articles or other resources

Credit to this article for providing this template: https://dev.to/shreyasminocha/how-i-do-my-git-commits-34d

Another great resource for guidance on this: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-framework/blob/30bce7/CONTRIBUTING.md#format-commit-messages

Bug Fix / Feature Branch Development

How do I create a new branch to fix a bug / develop a new feature?

git branch $BRANCHNAME

# then need to change onto that branch to work
git checkout $BRANCHNAME

# can do both of those steps at once
git checkout -b $BRANCHNAME

I want to push a new branch to GitHub; what do I have to do?

# the very first time you go to push content to a new branch on the origin, you
# need to tell the origin to create that branch
git push --set-origin origin $BRANCHNAME

# once that branch is created, git push will automatically push to the branch
# that you have specified

GitHub Issues

Pull Requests

  • One way that branches can be merged into master is using Pull Requests on GitHub

Ignoring local files from git control

Text editors, IDEs, and Python itself can create a lot of temporary files in your repository that you do not want to share with collaborators because they can cause conflicts with another user's local configuration and can be quite large. Examples of this include:

  • __pycache__/ (Python; will cause conflicts)
  • *.pyc (Python; will cause conflicts)
  • .idea/ (PyCharm, user-specific)
  • .venv/.env/env/venv/ (Python virtualenv, can be large)

Additionally, you may have test data and scripts that you also don't want to share.

Instead of having these files constantly show up in your git status output and be game to inadvertently be added to the git history, you can tell git to ignore these files by creating a .gitignore files that contains file and directory name patterns that you want to ignore. If there are files that you very commonly need to ignore in your repositories, you can add them to a file in your home directory: $HOME/.gitignore_global.

❓ What if I already committed these files by mistake?
If you want to remove these sort of files from your git history (moving forward), but want to retain you local copy, you can use the command git rm --cached. (Removing these files from your existing git commit history is another ball of wax, covered in some detail here: https://help.github.com/articles/removing-sensitive-data-from-a-repository/)