/Git

What Happens on GitLab When You Do Git Push?

- Li Zhennan tl;dr: The post provides background on the internal structure of a Git repository and the Git data model, and then summarizes the end-to-end flow of a git push to GitLab over SSH and HTTP(S), highlighting interactions between the client, GitLab components, and the Git hooks. 

featured in #502

The “Current Branch" In Git

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “I’ve been thinking more about what the term “current branch” means in git and it’s a little weirder than I thought.” Julia shares 4 possible definitions and scenarios for each. 

featured in #500

Modern Git Commands And Features You Should Be Using

- Martin Heinz tl;dr: “Most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as add, commit, push or pull, like it's still 2005. Git however, introduced many features since then, and using them can make your life so much easier, so let's explore some of the recently added, modern git commands, that you should know about.” Martin presents Switch, Restore, Sparse Checkout, Worktree and Bisect. 

featured in #497

How HEAD Works In Git

- Julia Evans tl;dr: Julia ran a poll asking people how confident they were that they understood how HEAD works in Git. The results were a little surprising... people were unconfident about their understanding. “Usually when people say that a topic is confusing when I think it’s not, the reason is that there’s actually some hidden complexity that I wasn’t considering. And after some follow up conversations, it turned out that HEAD actually was a bit more complicated than I’d appreciated!”

featured in #496

Modern Git Commands And Features You Should Be Using

- Martin Heinz tl;dr: “Most people only ever touch the most basic of commands, such as add, commit, push or pull, like it's still 2005. Git however, introduced many features since then, and using them can make your life so much easier, so let's explore some of the recently added, modern git commands, that you should know about.” Martin presents Switch, Restore, Sparse Checkout, Worktree and Bisect. 

featured in #496

How I Use Git Worktrees

- Bill Mill tl;dr: “My favorite feature of git is one that not enough people know about: worktrees. Worktrees allow you to store branches of your repository in separate directories. This means you can switch branches by changing directory, instead of switching between branches in the same directory with git checkout or git switch. I've never seen anybody describe using worktrees quite the way I do, so I thought I'd write out how I like to work with them.”

featured in #495

Popular Git Config Options

- Julia Evans tl;dr: “I always wish that command line tools came with data about how popular their various options are, like: (1) “basically nobody uses this one”. (2) “80% of people use this, probably take a look”. (3) “this one has 6 possible values but people only really use these 2 in practice.” Julia asked about people’s favourite git config options and shares the responses.  

featured in #490

Git Tips And Tricks

- Scott Chacon tl;dr: “I’m going to write 3 short articles on some interesting Git things for intermediate to advanced Git users that you may not know, either because they just never came up or because they're pretty new and you've been using Git the same way for years. The topics are: (1) Oldies but goodies. (2) Some subtle new things. (3) Really large repositories and monorepos.”

featured in #489

My Favourite Git Commit

- David Thompson tl;dr: “I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit. This commit is from my time at the Government Digital Service, working on GOV.UK. It has the rather unassuming name of “Convert template to US-ASCII to fix error.””

featured in #486

Dealing With Diverged Git Branches

- Julia Evans tl;dr: "One of the most common problems I see folks struggling with in Git is when a local branch (like "main") and a remote branch (maybe also called "main") have diverged. There are two things that make this hard: (1) If you’re not used to interpreting git’s error messages, it’s nontrivial to realize that your main has diverged from the remote. (2) There's no single clear way to handle it - it depends on the situation and your git workflow." Julia discusses what to do.

featured in #485