The Git cookbook

Git, you either love it for its power or hate it for it's ui. While I'm a trained git apologist and love its power and flexibility, I've also done a lot of git user support at work and in the #git IRC channel. I understand the frustration of the jumble of jargon, inconsistency and arcana that is the git UI and will help you dive into it!

If you have questions, comments or suggestions about any of the articles, please leave a comment on the article or in the issue tracker on GitLab. Suggestions for new articles are also very welcome!

Git and configuration files

Posted on Wed 17 August 2016 in Effective git usage • Tagged with configuration • Leave a comment

How do you keep local changes to the configuration files in your project's repository? Should you use update-index, or is there a better way to ignore local changes. None of that nonsense, your configuration files do not belong there and in this article I'll show you why, and what alternatives there are for your configuration files.

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Describing the relationship between commits

Posted on Sun 20 March 2016 in Effective git usage • Tagged with hooks, describe, ancestor, merge-base, branch, rev-parse • Leave a comment

Unless you have only one commit in your repository, no commit stands on it own and all commits can be related to each other. These relationships can be described in multiple ways, from exact revision walking paths to a vague 'are these commits even related'?

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Undoing all kinds of mistakes

Posted on Sun 20 March 2016 in Effective git usage • Tagged with checkout, reset, rebase, rewrite, undo, stash • Leave a comment

Git understands that humans are not perfect, and that often we want to change our minds about what we did. To help with this, git offers many tools to undo our changes and even change history. The trick is knowing when to use which tool.

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Previewing a merge result

Posted on Mon 07 December 2015 in Effective git usage • Tagged with merge, diff • Leave a comment

Can you preview what the result of a merge would look like? Sort of, here you can learn how.

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Always using the latest and greatest git

Posted on Wed 04 November 2015 in Effective git usage • Tagged with next, install • Leave a comment

Help testing Git development by using packages that integrate with Ubuntu, Debian CentOS and Fedora.

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Using credential helpers to cache passwords

Posted on Wed 04 November 2015 in Effective git usage • Tagged with authentication, http • Leave a comment

Never type your passwords again, but store them safely in a password manager Git can use.

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