Introduction
A lot of develops say they know Git, some even state that they are Git “experts”. Being an expert might be a streaching a bit for most I would argue. However being an expert in anything is in my opinion very relative and up for debate. None the less I often meet new develops and onboarding develops, who claim their expertice using Git, only to find out that they only comfortable in the trevial git pull
, git commit
and git push
process. And often heavvily rely on their editor providing the buttons to do so.
As such I tend to teach people that Git can do so much more, and that the “basics” (in my opionion) is easy to learn and a valuable for the everyday work as productive developers.
I have gathered a list of git operations / commands and what they do in basic terms as a goto Git Cheat Sheet.
The Basics
Cmd | Explanation |
---|---|
git init directory |
Create empty Git repo in specified directory. Run with no arguments to initialize the current directory as a git repository |
git clone <repo> |
text |
git config user.name <name> commonly use --global flag to set config options for current user. |
Define author name to be used for all commits in current repo. Devs |
git add <directory> Replace <directory> with a <file> to change a specific file. |
Stage all changes in |
git commit -m "<message>" |
Commit the staged snapshot, but instead of launching a text editor, use |
git status |
List which files are staged, unstaged, and untracked. |
git log |
Display the entire commit history using the default format. |
git diff |
Show unstaged changes between your index and working directory |