8 Jul 2015 • 3 minute read
Some notes on terminology
In case you’re not familiar with some of the terminology used below, here is a small glossary.
Object
An object in Git is either a blob (file), tree (directory), commit, or tag. All objects in Git have a hash (like 99b69df491c0bcf5262a967313fad8be0098352e) and are connected in a way that allows them to be modelled as a directed acyclic graph.
Reference
A reference in Git is a bit like a pointer, or a symlink. References are not objects themselves, and they always point to either an object or another reference. Branches, tags, and HEAD are examples of references.
You can learn about all of this and much more in my Hacker’s Guide to Git.
(Read more) 26 May 2014 • 46 minute read A Hacker’s Guide to Git is now available as an e-book. You can purchase it on Leanpub.
Introduction
Git is currently the most widely used version control system in the world, mostly thanks to GitHub. By that measure, I’d argue that it’s also the most misunderstood version control system in the world.
This statement probably doesn’t ring true straight away because on the surface, Git is pretty simple. It’s really easy to pick up if you’ve come from another VCS like Subversion or Mercurial. It’s even relatively easy to pick up if you’ve never used a VCS before. Everybody understands adding, committing, pushing and pulling; but this is about as far as Git’s simplicity goes. Past this point, Git is shrouded by fear, uncertainty and doubt.
(Read more) 17 Aug 2013 • 1 minute read Most Bower packages will be fetched using a git:// URL, which connects on port 9418. This can be problematic if you’re behind a firewall which blocks this port.
You can get around this quite easily by telling Git to always use https:// instead of git://:
git config --global url.https://.insteadOf git://
Today I found out just how easy it is to convert an SVN repository to Git without losing any commit history. Note that you will need git-svn (apt-get install git-svn on Debian/Ubuntu).
git svn clone http://mysvnrepo.com/my-project my-project
cd my-project
git remote add origin git@mygitrepo.com:/my-project.git
git push origin master
Et voilà, my-project.git has the full commit history of the my-project SVN repository.
If anybody knows whether SVN branches can be converted to Git branches, please get in touch!
(Read more) 29 Aug 2011 • 1 minute read Name and email address
Each commit you make has your name and email address attached to it. Git will automatically configure these based on your username and hostname, but this information is usually not a good identifier. It is a good idea to set your real name and email address so that your commits can be identified easily.
git config --global user.name "Your Name"
git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.com
Global ignore file
Often there are files or directories that you want Git to ignore globally. These are probably created automatically by your IDE or operating system. Git’s core.excludesfile config allows you to write a global .gitignore so that you don’t have to fill local .gitignore files with clutter.
git config --global core.excludesfile /path/to/.gitignore_global
Git’s archive command is basically the equivalent of SVN’s export – it dumps a copy of the entire repository without any of the version control files, making it perfect for deploying to a testing or production server.
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