Git Practices

This is a summary of some common things you might need to look up, or things I might forget.

Branches

I like to use short lived branches and I’m the one who’s responsible for it. I’d suggest you do the same.

It helps reduce potential issues when someone needs to re-write git history in a branch.

But be warned. replacing git history is dangerous. It can cause others confusion.

The general idea is that you shouldn’t replace a commit that has been pushed remotely.

Branch protection policies are great to stop me and you from doing dumb things, like replacing another persons work.

Useful things

Editing the current commit

# make your changes

git add . # or stage your specific changes
git commit --amend # This will **replace** your existing commit locally
# This will **replace** the commit remotely, but it will error if someone else has pushed
git push --force-with-lease

Editing previous commit(s)

Say you want to edit your last 3 commits, you would run:

git rebase HEAD~3

This will show something like this: Change “pick” to “edit” or “e” for each commit you want to change.

pick f7f3f6d Change my name a bit
pick 310154e Update README formatting and add blame
pick a5f4a0d Add cat-file

# Rebase 710f0f8..a5f4a0d onto 710f0f8
#
# Commands:
# p, pick <commit> = use commit
# r, reword <commit> = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit <commit> = use commit, but stop for amending
# s, squash <commit> = use commit, but meld into previous commit
# f, fixup <commit> = like "squash", but discard this commit's log message
# x, exec <command> = run command (the rest of the line) using shell
# b, break = stop here (continue rebase later with 'git rebase --continue')
# d, drop <commit> = remove commit
# l, label <label> = label current HEAD with a name
# t, reset <label> = reset HEAD to a label
# m, merge [-C <commit> | -c <commit>] <label> [# <oneline>]
# .       create a merge commit using the original merge commit's
# .       message (or the oneline, if no original merge commit was
# .       specified). Use -c <commit> to reword the commit message.
#
# These lines can be re-ordered; they are executed from top to bottom.
#
# If you remove a line here THAT COMMIT WILL BE LOST.
#
# However, if you remove everything, the rebase will be aborted.
#
# Note that empty commits are commented out

Now, make your changes

git add . # or stage your specific changes

git commit --amend
git rebase --continue

git push --force-with-lease

See https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Rewriting-History for more details

Squashing commits