Day 5

Taking a fork in the road

In the Git glossary, you’ll read this sentence: “In most cases, [main] contains the local development, though that is purely by convention and isn’t required.”

🔑 Branches isolate your development from the rest of your work and from the master branch. Anytime you think, “I wish I had a copy of my repository,” you should immediately think, “I’ll just make a new branch!”

Furthermore, branch names aren’t prescribed by git. You are free to elect whatever works for you branching needs e.g. “BUG101”; “super-new-idea”; “hippo\branch\bot”

Commands in Play

• git branch [-d] [branch-name]
• git branch [-v]
• git checkout [checkout-name]
  • git checkout -b createbranch startingpoint -> Example: Using flags and options to create branch, starting from another branch, and switch to it in one step!
  • ‼️ This is also the command to restore a deleted branch by substituting DEL_BRANCH_SHA1ID for ‘startingpoint’.
• git log –oneline
• git log –graph –decorate –pretty=oneline –all –abbrev-commit
  • git config —global alias.lol “log –graph –decorate –pretty=oneline –all –abbrev-commit” -> makes git lol alias to the long command!
• git branch [branch-name] [YOUR_SHA1ID] -> Example: Bugfix is 2 nodes behind master
• git check-ref-format
• git reflog -> Show all the times you changed branches
• git stash [list] [pop] -> Create a special commit for your WIP so that you may change branches with uncommitted changes

9.5.1 Using the GUI for branch work

Q: Deletion of branches off the tag ‘four_files_galore’: is it easier in the gitk GUI? A: GITK GUI requires the two finger click on the tag name to access the proper action. On the CLI, its branch -d my-unwanted-branch four_files_galore.

9.5.2 Warm-up questions

1. If you create a branch in error, could you rename the branch instead of deleting it?
   A: You may: git branch -m oops-branch rename-branch

2. In section 9.2.2, you had to search for the SHA1 ID of the commit containing the string ‘Renaming c and d’. How would you identify this SHA1 ID when using the command git rev-parse?

3. Section 9.2.1 introduced a lengthy git log command. Look up what all the switches do! (Try running the command and leaving some of the switches out.) A: This was git log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --all --abbrev-commit that was aliased in git-config to git lol.

4. What happens to the commits of a branch if you delete that branch?
   A: In Git, branches are just pointers (references) to commits in a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of commits. This means that deleting a branch removes only references to commits, which might make some commits in the DAG unreachable, thus invisible. But all commits that were on a deleted branch would still be in the repository, at least until unreachable commits get pruned (e.g. using git-gc). version control - Does deleting a branch in git remove it from the history? - Stack Overflow

Resources

Git prompt completions