I just recently finished learning about git in a classroom setting, so every step from forking to cloning to branching and staging then committing into pushing ending with pulling. All the parts to get the gist of git, but nothing in the way of advanced use. Enter this article written by Gitlab.
As its title suggests, “15 Git tips to improve your workflow” has 15 total tips in regards to git, so lets go through some of them together.
1. Git aliases; amazing function, to think that rather than checkout, branch, or commit I could use a custom name. This is, in my opinion, great for new devs since once they grasp the concept of what a command does they can alias it to something that makes sense to them.
2. Visualizing repo status with git-prompt.sh; needs to be downloaded but definitely a useful tool for people like me who benefit from a more visual experience.
3. Command line commit comparisons; definitely more of a practical command that is helpful to see your workflow. Definitely going to be using this one to help me track what I actually worked on and might even download the Meld tool they mentioned.
4. Stashing commits; another practical command that makes sense just for a dev to know. If you have to push a sudden fix in the middle of adding a feature you can stash the changes made for the feature, commit the fix and then just pop the stash to get back all the previous work.
5. Pull frequently; nothing to add.
6. Auto-complete commands; tab to automatically finish a word is also applicable in search engine prompts as well. So useful for a new dev since if they forget the command but remember the first letter they can just flick through the commands until they find what they were looking for.
7. Set a global .gitignore; create a list of files to remove from commits and put it on the exclusion list, nice and simple.
8. Enable autosquash by default; had to look this up, apparently the squash command merges commits into one big commit. Personally not too sure of the use case so will have to test it out at a later date.
9. Delete branches locally that remote removed when fetching/pulling; as part of fetch, there is a prune attribute that will work this functionality and it just needs to be set to true.
Obviously there are 6 more tips and they are: Use Git blame more efficiently, Add an alias to check out merge requests locally, An alias of HEAD
, Resetting files, The git-open
plugin, and The git-extras
plugin. I will not go over them here but definitely give the article a read if you are interested.
Link:
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/07/15-git-tips-improve-workflow/
From the blog CS@Worcester – Coder's First Steps by amoulton2 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.