Everybody knows Git right – add, commit, push, pull… Simple right? Well there a whole bunch of other commands and functionality to use, so let’s check some out…

So much typing… or Aliases

Programmers are inherently lazy creatures - I speak from experience. If you do it once - fine. If you do it twice - script it.

When you edit files, or add new ones, usually it’s something like:

<edit file>
git add . (or use '-A' if you add a new file)
git commit -am 'commit message'
git push

That’s too much work - let’s create an alias:

git config --global alias.ac '!git add -A && git commit -m'

Now our workflow is a little easier.

<edit files>
git ac 'message' 
git push

Ahh - that’s a bit better.

Oops - didn’t mean to do that…

How many times have you commited the wrong thing… YES YOU HAVE!!! ADMIT IT!

git revert <sha>

Wait what was I working on?

So how can I check the commit history, view the logs or the last few commits?

git reflog
git log --graph --decorate --oneline
git log -S (search git log for file contents)

I’ll get right back to you…

Ever need to quickly save your work, switch to the CORRECT branch and apply those updates?

git stash / stash pop (local only, no commits)

Keep in mind that this does NOT create a commit, or save your work ANYWHERE other than locally, on your machine, temporarily.

Or lord - we deleted that branch on the server, why do I still see it?

Don’t forget that Git is a DISTRIBUTED system, so the remote is the same structure as locally, but STRUCTURALLY might be different - deleting branches after pull requests might clean them from the central server, but what about your local clone?

git branch -vv
git remote update --prune

Well that’s close - but let’s really clean then up locally…

git branch -vv | awk '/: gone]/{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d