Category: Git(Hub) Tip of the Day 2017

How to end a tip of the day series when you need a vacation – 128

Hey readers! I’m going to wrap up the series today. I need a summer vacation. It was a good run, but an outdoors run is even better! 🙂

Here’s a recap of the most popular tips and what was next in the queue for me to write about.

Best Tips

How to demystify Git commands using Visualizing Git – 081
How to fix (and visualize) the “oh no! I’ve accidentally committed on master instead of a branch” – 082 with full kudos and acknowledgement to ohshitgit.com
How not to quit your career when Git opens a vi editor – 072
How not to quit your career when Git (via Visual Studio) adds <<<< HEAD into your code – 094
How to use the arrows in the View History graphs in Visual Studio – 078
How to find when a line was last changed in Visual Studio – 080

In the queue to be written

git commit –dry-run // yep it is a thing, but was still figuring out what it does and doesn’t do
git push –dry-run // is that even possible?
git remote prune origin
what is a “tip” in git? I think it is the last commit for a given branch. Or is a Tip what the actual pointer is called that points to the last commit in a branch. I’ve been debating which is which from reading this SO thread.

What every Windows user should know

Check out my list of 9 things I learned about GitHub after becoming a GitHubber.
tl;dr – Use GitHub Desktop for authentication and setting up .gitattributes for line endings. Use the GitHub Extension for Visual Studio for reviewing pull requests (and check out their new training). Use Git Shell (for Git Bash or PowerShell).

What to read now

If you don’t want to click 127 times back and forth, check out Ed’s O’Reilly course called Git for Visual Studio. (Thanks again Ed!)
Make sure you practice using ohshitgit.com before you need it! The best offense is a good defense, or so I’ve been told. I’d prefer eating popcorn from the stands 🙂
Check out the new GitHub for Windows users course – see the links on the left-hand side and the “continue” at the bottom.
Practice, practice, practice using Visualizing Git or some other visualization tool to break any mental models you might have of centralized VCS. There was so much I never got to with remotes, cherry pick, etc using the Visualizing Git. And don’t forgot it is an open source project.
I enjoyed reading Git for Humans. It was nice to practice a bit on my own, and then go back to the book to make sure I was understanding the concepts. Again, I think my biggest challenge was unlearning previous expected behaviors from centralized VCS.
And when the time is right, go read Pro Git. You can also get the book from Amazon. I really want to understand the underlying plumbing in Git in hopes it will help me break my past mental models.

Thanks again to everyone who helped answer my questions, participated in the comments, or simply told me I could take on this challenge. Although I only made it 35% of my goal (not because of lack of material, but because of the lack of outdoors). I learned a lot about the fundamentals I didn’t realize I was lacking, and that was worth it! I hope this series was useful to you as well!

How to handle a failed push when the remote contains work you don’t have locally – 127

In Visual Studio, if the remote contains work that you don’t have locally, and you try to do a push to that branch, you’ll see the following in Visual Studio Team Explorer:

The output window contains more information:

You’ll resolve this by clicking Pull

Visual Studio will automatically do any merges. Since there are were no conflicts, the auto-merge was successful and created a merge commit.

Now you can simply Push these changes up to the remote.

From the command line

Here’s what the corresponding scary message looks like from command line.

You’ll first want to Git Pull – which will result with Notepad prompting me to update my merge commit message if needed.

And now in Mortal Kombat fashion (I spelled Kombat right this time), you need to Finish It!

and do a Git Push.

How to view newly added branches on a remote – 126

A few weeks ago I tried to figure out how to do this, but to no avail. I couldn’t find an answer because the solution is a more of a generic “catch-all” command to get lots of info about a remote, including figuring out which branches were newly added to a remote.

$ git remote show origin

Note how next to the circled `saraford-patch-1` you see the text `new (next featch will store in remotes/origin). Now I know what new branches (if any) I’ll “fetch down” the next time I do a fetch.

Obviously this command shows other goodness, like seeing which local branch talks to which remote branch, and more importantly, what “origin” (or some other specified remote) points to.

Thanks to Jeff (blog comments) for the pointer to `git remote show origin` which answered my question!

How to git pull to download and merge new changes from remote branch into your local branch via command line – 125

And now for the exciting conclusion*

As shown in Tip 118 – how to download and merge commits using Pull in Visual Studio, today’s tip rinse and repeats from the command line.

Unlike this past week, you are ready to fetch changes and merge them all in one command: Pull.

First, checkout the desired branch.

Second, run the following

$ git pull

And git will perform the fetch and merge all at the same time.

*I think my greatest obstacle in learning git commands is knowing when a command or subcommand wants 1. a remote 2. a branch name 3. nothing at all.

Has anyone tried nursery rhymes yet to learn git commands in the same way we learn the names of the planets? I really need to get back into standup comedy.