Essential Git Commands

Basic Operations

git pull --rebase origin main

• Fetches changes from the ‘main’ branch and rebases your local commits on top, avoiding merge commits

git push --force-with-lease

• Force pushes changes while ensuring you don’t overwrite others’ work (safer than --force)

git reset --hard HEAD

• Discards all uncommitted changes in your working directory

Staging and Committing

git add -p

• Interactively choose parts of files to stage, allowing for more granular commits

git commit --amend

• Modifies your most recent commit (message and/or content)

git stash

• Temporarily saves uncommitted changes to work on something else

git stash pop

• Applies and removes the most recently stashed changes

Branching

git checkout -b branch-name

• Creates and switches to a new branch in one command

git branch -d branch-name

• Deletes a branch after it’s been merged

git merge --no-ff branch-name

• Merges a branch while preserving branch history

History and Inspection

git log --oneline --graph

• Displays commit history as a graph with one-line summaries

git blame file.txt

• Shows who last modified each line in a file

git diff

• Shows unstaged changes between your working directory and staging

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origin vs upstream

In Git, “origin” and “upstream” are commonly used terms to refer to remote repositories, but they serve different purposes:

• origin: This is the default name given to the remote repository from which you cloned your local repository. It typically refers to your own fork of a project. When you run commands like git fetch origin or git push origin main, you’re interacting with your fork.
• upstream: This term is used to refer to the original repository from which your fork was created. It is the source repository that you want to keep your fork in sync with. When you run commands like git fetch upstream or git merge upstream/main, you’re pulling in changes from the original project into your fork.- To set up “upstream” for your fork, you would typically run:
• To set up “upstream” for your fork, you would typically run:

  git remote add upstream <URL-of-original-repository>