Awesome Git

Git tips for Developers.

I use Git all the time n its awesome tool for the versions control.

Most of the developers I came across don’t know much other than basic commiting, branching, merging etc. I would love to add couple of other commands that helped me a lot during managing code base, hopefully will help you too.

  • Git blame

    #### (Blame it on somebody n life will become very easy :p)

    • Let’s take an example you have some massive code base and 10 programmers are working on your app. There is some broken part of code and you want to figure out who wrote that part of code, try Git blame.

        git blame path_of_file

    • It will give your something like:-

        b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  1) ---
  b4eca87b (Taroon  Tyagi  2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  2) layout: post
  b4eca87b (Manoj   Kumar  2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  3) title: Rails and Git hooks
  b4eca87b (Taroon  Tyagi  2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  4) ---
  b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  5)
  4fd0e67e (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-25 01:07:11 +0530  6) ### Automate your repeated task like **bundle install** and **rake db:migrate** on every pull.
  b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  7)
  b4eca87b (Taroon  Tyagi  2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  8) ###Procedure:
  b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530  9)
  b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530 10) * Enter into hooks directory in your projects.
  771a0506 (Taroon  Tyagi  2015-04-18 00:03:02 +0530 11)
  c002c48b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:58:30 +0530 12) ```
  b4eca87b (Peeyush Singla 2015-04-17 23:44:53 +0530 13) cd myawesomeproject/.git/hooks

    • It will show changes done for every line of code and who did it, but I used to have 1000 lines in my file and git blame this way don’t work for me. I used to need to blame only the small part of whole file so used this solution:-

        git blame -L 1,10 path_of_file

    • Here -L is lines and 1 is starting and 10 is end line. Now it will show all the details of only those lines and saved a lot of time for me to check whole file.

    • Other thing is I use Sublime text for development purpose and here is the awesome Git package that glue it with Sublime, its available with package control as well.

  • Git log

    #### (Logging details the Git way):-

    • Git log by default show the commit hash, commit message and commiter.

    • This stuff is not enough for me, I used to check what were the changes in commit and do it this way:-

        git log -p -number_of_commits

    • I used to check what are changes in specific file w.r.t commits because I need to check what part was changed in each commit and git log is awesome tool for it.

        git log path_of_file

    • It will print only commits those have changes for the given file, and to show the changes as well use -p option:-

        git log -p path_of_file

  • Git Stash

    #### (Smash the code with Git stash):-

    • Git stash is another very useful command, let’s assume the case when I have done couple of changes in file and all of sudden I need to work on some hot fix for deployment.

    • First step:-

        git stash

    • Git stash will add my changes to stash and my working directroy will be pointing to HEAD again.

    • Now I did all the changes required for hot fix and deployed, now I need the code that I was working on back. I will do:-

        git stash pop

    I will get the code changes I stashed and without commiting any unfinished feature it helps to manage the state of code.

Happy Coding :)

Written on May 12, 2015

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