Git

Git prevents branches with the same name. But sometimes, I want to re-use a name! Here’s my workaround. ...

“Keep binaries out of version control” is a truth I’ve always held, but I recently learned more about why. ...

Sometimes I’ll be looking at a Git commit online, and want to put my dev environment in a world where the commit is un-applied. This can be achieved by applying it in reverse. ...

Today I solved a mystery: a file was being Git-ignored in a new project that didn’t have a .gitignore. Here’s me learning this by trying and failing to add it: $ git add destroy.sh The following paths are ignored by one of your .gitignore files: destroy.sh This output tells me some .gitignore is telling Git to ignore my script. Another way to confirm this is the check-ignore command: $ git check-ignore destroy.sh destroy.sh The output here is the match; a file named destroy.sh is indeed being ignored. But how? We can answer that question with the -v flag: ...

Some code is broken, and you can’t figure out why. Maybe there are a lot of changes, and identifying the breaking change seems impossible. Or, maybe you’re curious about how things break in your organization. The tool you need is git-bisect. ...

You’ve been working on a big set of changes, and haven’t committed to Git yet. Now, you want to commit some, but not all, changes to a file. Let’s look at adding patches. ...

When I rebase, I force-push altered history using the flag --force-with-lease instead of the commonly-used --force. git push --force-with-lease But why? This is a TIL for me because I’ve used this command for years without reading the docs. Take it away, docs: This option allows you to say that you expect the history you are updating is what you rebased and want to replace. If the remote ref still points at the commit you specified, you can be sure that no other people did anything to the ref. ...

I’m working on a team where we keep a clone of the development branch (the main place where work is done), used to deploy to a QA environment. The benefits of this branching technique are: clone is isolated from work It’s easy to tell what was deployed to QA– clone is the source of truth ...

My current favorite command line alias is mgrim, composed of four other aliases. Here’s what it is, and what it does. ...

Many pull requests go through a cycle: programmer opens pull request, maintainer gives feedback, programmer makes changes, repeat until ready to merge, maintainer merges. Prior to the merge, the pull request can be messy, full of reverts, fixups, and WIP commits. In the end, those commits are noise. We can tell a better story by squashing the branch. ...