Introduction to GIT with GIT commands

Recently I had some experiance working with git and I thought of sharing most basic and mostly used set of git commands. Before we begin I will give a quick introduction to "git".

What is "git"? 

Git is an open source distributed version control system designed to manange source code, system which designed for speed and efficiency. So the important factor here to remember is git is a distributed version control system unlike the old fasion centralized version control system such as SVN. In a centralized VCS you have a server which has all the source code and clients, and these two parties can be distringuishly identified. If a client wants to use the code to  do any modification, they have to checkout the source from the server and comit back to the server. So the entire code base stays in a single data store.If you loose the data store then you are screwed!!!. Git on the other hand is a distributed version control system, what it means is you dont check out a version of a project to start working but you clone it. So you just clone it to the local file system, this way is far efficient and you can work offline (You dont have to be online for most operations) no network issues,you can push and pull directly to peers. This means almost everything is local, so its very fast, every clone is a backup (so everyone working in that project has a backup for the system), and you can work offline.

Why use "git"?

I asked a friend why he thinks a project/company should adopt "git", his simple answer was less build breaks :D (which of course a good enough answer) and you can give restricted commit rights to team members so no careless glitches :). But of course there's more to that story, So I listed down few advantages which I could think of "git" and Why projects should move to "git"

• Its very fast (since almost everything is local)

• You want lose your code (Every clone is a backup to the system)

• You can work offline to perfom each of the mostly used task such as:

                 performing a diff,

                 viewing file history, 

                 committing changes, 

                merging branches,

                obtaining other revision of a file, 

                switching branches 

Which means you can work anywhere in the world even when you are up in the sky !!!!

• Its imutable (it never removes data) -"git" will not re write your history, it will always write a new history (you will have a pointer to your new history) you can always go back so you want lose data.

Before I begin I should warn you, if you are used to old fasion version control system like SVN you are going to hate "git". You will start hating everything about "git" and get tired of it very easily. Because its very differant from the centralized version control systems for example most version control systems are file based delta storage its mainly file based operations on the other hand "git" thinks about data as snapshots,it looks at the content (ignores the filename) and put that content in the database as key value pairs and return the key.That is, instead of thinking about and storing commit points as file based patches or changes, it stores it as a simple snapshot of what your project looked like when you committed.. So the easiest way to get you hands on these cool stuff, you need to foget all you know about centralized version control systems, youve been using for the past years and start thinking differantly and it will blow your mind :)

Before I bore you off with the conceptual infomation on "git" I will start giving the most commonly used "git" commands to start off with "git" and I will continue explaining interesting stuff about "git" in my next blog posts.

init -  This will initialize a brand new git repository in a project directory.

git init

clone - This will clone an exact copy of an existing project.

git clone http://git.stratos.com/amani.com/poo

add - Adding files

To add a single file:

 git add info.php

To add multiple files:

 git add info.php README.txt

To add all the files in the directory:

git add .

Status - This tells you what files have been modified since the last time they were committed.

git status

commit - Commit changes to head (but not yet to the remote repository):

git commit -m "Committing my changes" 

Push - Send changes to the master branch of your remote repository

git push origin master

Blame - To check who screwed it up :)

git blame hello.java

If you screwed it up :( ?

reset - Revert the uncommited changes from last commit

git reset --hard HEAD

checkout - Undo local changes 

git checkout -- myFile.txt

* If you mess up, you can replace the changes in your working tree with the last content in head:

Changes already added to the index, as well as new files, will be kept.

fetch - fetch the latest history from the server and point your local master branch at it.

git fetch origin

git reset --hard origin/master

Grep - Search the working directory for isService():

git grep "isService()"

Thats it for now to get a quick start on git try GitHub. GitHub made git more easy,  you can try it out and boost up on git with GitHub. :)