Git cheat sheet

Git setup

If you're a first time Git user, set up your global Git configuration first:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

Enabling color output is highly recommended:

git config --global color.ui auto

You can also create your own global .gitignore file in $HOME, and put rules for your editor temp files in there. Enable it like this:

git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore

For Git versions below 2.0: By default, git push without arguments pushes all local branches to existing branches with the same name on the remote. This is not what most users expect. It is recommended to change the push.default setting to simple or upstream, so only the current branch will be pushed to its upstream branch.

git config --global push.default simple

ASF committers can set their Apache username, so they don't have to enter it with every commit:

git config credential.username <username>

Cloning

To clone the repository:

git clone https://git-wip-us.apache.org/repos/asf/lucy.git

Standard workflow

git checkout <branch>
git pull --rebase
# Edit
git commit
git push

Working with branches

Create and switch to a local branch:

git checkout -b <branch>

Push local branch to remote for the first time:

git push -u origin <branch>

Use the -u option to automatically setup the remote tracking configuration.

Checkout a remote tracking branch:

git checkout --track origin/<branch>

Or with a recent Git version, simply:

git checkout <branch>

Delete a remote branch:

git push origin :<branch>

Merging branches and keeping linear history

If you want to merge a branch to master and keep linear history, copy the branch to a temporary branch, rebase the temporary branch onto master, then merge the rebased branch:

git checkout -b tmp <branch>
git rebase master
# Fix possible conflicts and review
git checkout master
git merge tmp

Then the temporary branch can be deleted:

git branch -d tmp

Merging Github pull requests

A simple way to get changes from Github is to run git fetch and then create a branch from FETCH_HEAD:

git fetch https://github.com/<user>/<repo> <branch>
git checkout -b pull-request FETCH_HEAD

Now you're on a local branch pull-request with all the commits from the pull request. You can review the changes and rebase them onto master if you want to keep linear history:

git rebase master

If everything looks good, merge to master:

git checkout master
git merge pull-request
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