Git is an open source version control system, allowing web developers to manage new, variant, and historical versions of their projects. Here are only a few of the common commands.
add
Updates the index using the current content found in the working tree.
git add -A Stages all files in the working tree.
git add . Stages new and modified files in the working tree, excluding deleted files (ignores actions that remove files).
git add -u Stages modified and deleted files in the working tree, excluding new files (ignores actions that add files).
branch
Lists, creates, or deletes branches.
git branch --list Lists existing branches, highlighting the current branch with an asterisk.
git branch -a Displays all local and remote branches.
git branch -r Displays all remote branches.
git branch -m old-branch new-branch Changes the name of the existing old-branch to new-branch.
git branch -d branch-name Deletes branch-name.
checkout
Moves from the current branch to the specified branch.
git checkout -b new-branch-name Creates a new branch named new-branch-name and makes it the current active branch.
git checkout branch-name Moves onto branch-name.
git checkout master Moves onto the master branch.
git checkout -- file.md Discards changes made to file.md since beginning work with the current directory.
clean
Cleans the working tree by removing untracked files.
git clean -fd Removes untracked directories and untracked files from the current branch.
commit
Stores the current content of the index in a new commit. A message must be added describing the commit using the syntax git commit -m “message”, with the message string wrapped in quotes.
git commit -m "message here" Identifies a commit message to follow (in quotes).
log
Shows the commit log for the working tree, including the commit ID and message.
merge
Merges the specified branch with the current branch.
git merge recent-branch Merges recent-branch with the current branch, like master.
pull
Fetches from a remote repository and integrates changes into the current branch.
git pull origin master Fetches and merges changes from the origin repository into the local master branch.
push
Pushes changes in the specified branch to the specified remote repository.
git push origin recent-branch Pushes the local version of recent-branch to origin.
git push origin master Pushes the master branch to the origin remote repository and checks out the master branch.
remote
Manages a set of tracked repositories.
git remote add name url Adds a remote named name for the repository located at url.
git remote -v Displays a list of all configured remote urls.
reset
Resets the current HEAD to the specified state.
git reset --hard some-commit Points the current branch to some-commit and exchanges the local working directory files and the index with versions of those committed in some-commit.
status
Displays the working tree status, showing paths that have differences between the index–staging area–and the current HEAD commit, paths that have differences between the working tree and index, and paths in the working tree that are not being tracked.
Remove all instances of a file
To remove all occurences of a specific file, use the following command. This is useful for Mac users who constantly battle the .DS_Store file that creeps into project directories. See my blog post on the .DS_Store file for more information.
find . -name .DS_Store -print0 | xargs -0 git rm -f --ignore-unmatch