/WebClubGitSession

Hey guys! These are the commands I'll be using in the screencast. Do follow along with me. And ask if you have any doubts!

Initialize a git repo

git init

View status of the repository

git status

Create a new file named 'new.txt'

Now view status again.

git status

Add the new file.

git add new.txt

View status again

git status

Now commit the addition of the new file. git commit -m "Message describing change eg. Added file new"

View history

git log

Add some content onto new.txt

Observe the status message.

git status

Follow same workflow - Add and commit.

git add new.txt
git commit -m "Content to new.txt"
git log

Now try this command.

git branch

The output will look like '* master'. This means you are on the 'master' branch. While developing, a good practice is to create a branch for a feature or change, work on that branch and once you are done merge it back to master! This way your master branch will remain 'clean'!

Create a new branch

git branch newBranch

Switch to that branch

git checkout newBranch

Now add one more line to the new.txt file, and follow the same workflow

git add .
git commit -m "Added second line"
git log

Hint: See how I did 'git add .'? This is a shortcut that adds all files!

Now try switching back to master and viewing the log.

git checkout master
git log

You'll see that it doesn't have the last commit we made in 'newBranch'. Now, we need to merge these two branches.

To merge, we need to switch to master and run the following command.

git checkout master
git merge newBranch

Check the log! You'll see that the commit we made in 'newBranch' has appeared here! new.txt has also been updated with the new content.

Now that we are done with the branch, let's delete it off.

git branch -d newBranch

While merging two branches, we may also run into conflicts. Let's illustrate this.

Make a branch 'conflictBranch'. Now on master, add a line to new.txt and commit it. Checkout to conflictBranch, and add a line with different content and commit that. Now try to merge these 2 branches.

The merge will fail and will ask you to fix conflicts! Fear not! This is not as hard as it sounds. Open up the new.txt file. You'll see some new things have appeared. The lines between the line where <<<.. HEAD and ====... appears is the content that is present on the current branch. The lines from ==... to <<<<<.. branch_name is the content in the branch that is trying to be merge.

Just remove the things you dont need and after this just add the file and commit it!

Another good practice is to commit often. Think of Hansel and Gretel leaving breadcrumbs! Your commits are these breadcrumbs. They let you go back to a point in history! To do this:

git reset <first 5 char of the commit hash you want to go back to>

'git reset' alone will set it back to the latest commit.

The git reset command just clears your staging area. If you want to set your file contents also back to that point, use 'git reset --hard'.

The commit hash is the huge number you see next to commit when you type git log.

If you're here, then you've got a working knowledge of git. Now, this is just a basic tutorial. Git has a lot more amazing features, which I'll leave to you to explore and find out!

#Remotes

So till now we were working with only one copy on our system right? But usually we store one copy of this on a remote server and then maintain both remote and local repositories. GitHub is a site which lets you host your repositories for free. You can also use BitBucket. For this exercise, we will be using GitHub.

So now think of having 2 copies. One on your machine and one on a server. There are 2 git commands that let us synchronise these 2 copies.

'git push' pushes the content from your local repo to the remote one. 'git pull' will fetch the content from the remote repo and attempt to merge it with your local repo.

Do look up forking, cloning and pull requests. GitHub explains them pretty well.

So now as exercise, fork this repository, clone it, and then inside the about folder, create a file with your name, describe yourself in the contents, add and commit, push to your fork and then issue a pull request!