Beej’s Guide to Git

Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall

v0.4.5, Copyright © September 19, 2024

Contents

1 Foreword 1
1.1 Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Official Homepage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.3 Email Policy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.4 Mirroring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.5 Note for Translators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.6 Copyright and Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
1.7 Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

2 Git Basics 4
2.1 What is Git? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
2.2 What is GitHub? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.3 What is GitHub? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.4 The Most Basic Git Workflow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
2.5 What is Cloning? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.6 How Do Clones Interact? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.7 Actual Git Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
2.7.1 Step 0: One-time Setup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.7.2 Step 1: Clone an Existing Repo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
2.7.3 Step 2: Make Some Local Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
2.7.4 Step 3: Add Changes to the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2.7.5 Step 4: Commit those Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
2.7.6 Step 5: Push Your Changes to the Remote Repo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3 GitHub: How To Use It 13

3.1 Making a GitHub Account . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.2 Creating a New Repo on GitHub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
3.3 Authentication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.3.1 GitHub CLI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.3.2 SSH Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
3.3.3 Using Personal Access Tokens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
3.4 Make a Local Clone of the Repo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4.1 Cloning from GitHub with GitHub CLI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.4.2 Cloning from GitHub with SSH Keys . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
3.5 Make Changes and Push! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
3.6 Collaboration on GitHub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

4 The Git Log and HEAD 19

4.1 An Example Log . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.2 What’s in the log? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
4.3 The HEAD Reference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.4 Going Back In Time and Detached HEAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
4.5 The New Command: git switch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
4.6 Commits Relative to HEAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

5 Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 25

5.1 What is a Branch? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
5.2 A Quick Note about git pull . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

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5.3 HEAD and Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

5.4 Creating a Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
5.5 Make Some Commits on a Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
5.6 Merging: Fast-Forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
5.7 Deleting a Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

6 Merging and Conflicts 33

6.1 An Example of Divergent Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
6.2 Merging Divergent Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
6.3 Merge Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
6.4 What a Conflict Looks Like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35
6.5 Why Merge Conflicts Happen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
6.6 Merging with IDEs or other Merge Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
6.7 Merge Big Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38

7 Using Subdirectories with Git 39

7.1 Repos and Subdirectories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
7.1.1 What about Subprojects? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
7.2 Accidentally Making a Repo in your Home Directory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
7.3 Empty Subdirectories in Repos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40

8 Ignoring Files with .gitignore 41

8.1 Adding a .gitignore File . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
8.2 Can I Specify Subdirectories in .gitignore? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
8.3 Where do I Put the .gitignore? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42
8.4 Wildcards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.5 Negated .gitignore Rules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.6 How To Ignore All Files Except a Few? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
8.7 Getting Premade .gitignore Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44

9 Remotes: Repos in Other Places 45

9.1 Remote and Branch Notation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
9.2 Getting a List of Remotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
9.3 Renaming a Remote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
9.4 Adding a Remote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

10 Remote Tracking Branches 48

10.1 Branches on Remotes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
10.2 Pushing to a Remote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
10.3 Making a Branch and Pushing to Remote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49

11 File States 51
11.1 What States Can Files in Git Be In? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
11.2 Unmodified to Untracked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
11.3 Files In Multiple States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

12 Comparing Files with Diff 54

12.1 Basic Usage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
12.2 Diffing the Stage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
12.3 More Diff Fun . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.3.1 Diff Any Commits or Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.3.2 Diffing with Parent Commit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
12.3.3 More Context . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
12.3.4 Just the File Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
12.3.5 Ignoring Whitespace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
12.3.6 Just Certain Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
12.3.7 Inter-branch Diffs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
12.4 Difftool . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
12.4.1 Configuring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
CONTENTS iii

12.4.2 Available Difftools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

13 Renaming and Removing Files 61

13.1 Renaming Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
13.2 Removing Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62

14 Collaboration across Branches 64

14.1 Communication and Delegation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
14.2 Approach: Everyone Uses One Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
14.3 Approach: Everyone Uses Their Own Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
14.4 Approach: Everyone Merges to the Dev Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66

15 Rebasing: Moving Commits 69

15.1 Contrasted to Merging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
15.2 How it Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
15.3 When Should I Do This? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
15.4 Pulling and Rebasing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
15.5 Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
15.6 Squashing Commits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
15.6.1 Squash versus Fixup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
15.7 Multiple Conflicts in the Rebase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77

16 Stashing: Temporarily Set Changes Aside 79

16.1 Example . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
16.2 The Stash Stack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
16.3 Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
16.4 Stashing New Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82

17 GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 83

17.1 Making a Fork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
17.2 Making Your Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
17.3 Syncing the Upstream with Your Fork . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
17.4 Making a Pull Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
17.5 Flipside: Merging a Pull Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
17.6 Making Many Pull Requests with Branches . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
17.7 Deleting a Pull Request . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
17.8 Syncing on the Command Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88

18 Reverting: Undoing Commits 90

18.1 Performing the Revert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
18.2 Revert Conflicts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
18.3 Reverting Multiple Commits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

19 Reset: Moving Branches Around 93

19.1 Soft Reset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
19.2 Mixed Reset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
19.3 Hard Reset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
19.4 Reset to a Divergent Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
19.5 Resetting Files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
19.6 Pushing Branch Changes to a Remote . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96
19.6.1 Forcing the Push . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
19.6.2 Example: Rewrite Public History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97
19.6.3 Example: Receiving Rewritten History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
19.7 Resetting Without Moving HEAD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
19.8 Resetting to Remove Credentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99

20 Appendix: Making a Playground 100

20.1 Cloning Bare Repos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
20.2 Automating Playground Builds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103
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21 Appendix: Getting Out of Editors 105

22 Appendix: Errors and Scary Messages 106

22.1 Detached Head . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106
22.2 Upstream Branch Name Doesn’t Match Current . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
22.3 Current Branch Has No Upstream Branch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Chapter 1

Foreword

Hello again, everyone! In my role as as industry professional-turned-college instructor, I definitely see

my fair share of students struggling with Git.
And who can blame ’em? It’s a seemingly-overcomplicated system with lots of pitfalls and merge conflicts
and detached heads and remotes and cherrypicks and rebases and an endless array of other commands that
do who-knows-what.
Which leads us directly to the goal: let’s make sense of all this. We’ll start off easy (allegedly) with
commands mixed in with some theory of operation. And we’ll see that understanding what Git does
under the hood is critical to using it correctly.
And I promise there’s definitely a chance that after you get through some of this guide, you might actually
start to appreciate Git and like using it.
I’ve been using it for years (I’m using it for the source code for this guide right now) and I can certainly
vouch for it becoming easier over time, and then, even, second nature.
But first, some boilerplate!

1.1 Audience
The initial draft of this guide was put online for the university students where I worked (or maybe still
work, depending on when you’re reading this) as an instructor. So it’s pretty natural to assume that’s the
audience I had in mind.
But I’m also hoping that there are enough other folks out there who might get something of use from the
guide, as well, and I’ve written it in a more general sense with all you non-college students in mind.
This guide assumes that you have basic POSIX shell (i.e. Bash, Zsh, etc.) usage skills, i.e.:
• You know basic commands like cd, ls, mkdir, cp, etc.
• You can install more software.
It also assumes you’re in a Unix-like environment, e.g. Linux, BSD, Unix, macOS, WSL, etc. with a
POSIX shell. The farther you are away from that (e.g. PowerShell, Commodore 64), the more manual
translation you’ll have to do.
Windows is naturally the sticking point, there. Luckily Git for Windows comes with a Bash shell variant
called Git Bash. You can also install WSL1 to get a Linux environment running on your Windows box.
I wholeheartedly recommend this for hacker types, since Unix-like systems are hacker-awesome, and
additionally I recommend you all become hacker types.
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Chapter 1. Foreword 2

1.2 Official Homepage

This official location of this document is (currently) https://beej.us/guide/bggit/2 .

1.3 Email Policy

I’m generally available to help out with email questions so feel free to write in, but I can’t guarantee a
response. I lead a pretty busy life and there are times when I just can’t answer a question you have. When
that’s the case, I usually just delete the message. It’s nothing personal; I just won’t ever have the time to
give the detailed answer you require.
As a rule, the more complex the question, the less likely I am to respond. If you can narrow down your
question before mailing it and be sure to include any pertinent information (like platform, compiler, error
messages you’re getting, and anything else you think might help me troubleshoot), you’re much more
likely to get a response.
If you don’t get a response, hack on it some more, try to find the answer, and if it’s still elusive, then write
me again with the information you’ve found and hopefully it will be enough for me to help out.
Now that I’ve badgered you about how to write and not write me, I’d just like to let you know that I fully
appreciate all the praise the guide has received over the years. It’s a real morale boost, and it gladdens me
to hear that it is being used for good! :-) Thank you!

1.4 Mirroring
You are more than welcome to mirror this site, whether publicly or privately. If you publicly mirror the
site and want me to link to it from the main page, drop me a line at beej@beej.us.

1.5 Note for Translators

If you want to translate the guide into another language, write me at beej@beej.us and I’ll link to your
translation from the main page. Feel free to add your name and contact info to the translation.
Please note the license restrictions in the Copyright and Distribution section, below.

1.6 Copyright and Distribution

Beej’s Guide to Git is Copyright © 2024 Brian “Beej Jorgensen” Hall.
With specific exceptions for source code and translations, below, this work is licensed under the Cre-
ative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. To view a copy of this
license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
One specific exception to the “No Derivative Works” portion of the license is as follows: this guide may
be freely translated into any language, provided the translation is accurate, and the guide is reprinted in
its entirety. The same license restrictions apply to the translation as to the original guide. The translation
may also include the name and contact information for the translator.
The programming source code presented in this document is hereby granted to the public domain, and is
completely free of any license restriction.
Educators are freely encouraged to recommend or supply copies of this guide to their students.
Contact beej@beej.us for more information.
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Chapter 1. Foreword 3

1.7 Dedication
The hardest things about writing these guides are:
• Learning the material in enough detail to be able to explain it
• Figuring out the best way to explain it clearly, a seemingly-endless iterative process
• Putting myself out there as a so-called authority, when really I’m just a regular human trying to
make sense of it all, just like everyone else
• Keeping at it when so many other things draw my attention
A lot of people have helped me through this process, and I want to acknowledge those who have made
this book possible.
• Everyone on the Internet who decided to help share their knowledge in one form or another. The
free sharing of instructive information is what makes the Internet the great place that it is.
• Everyone who submitted corrections and pull-requests on everything from misleading instructions
to typos.
Thank you! ♥
Chapter 2

Git Basics

Welcome to the Beej’s Guide to Git!

This guide has two goals, in no particular order:
1. Help you get some familiarity with Git syntax on the command line.
2. Help you get a mental model that describes how Git stores its information.
I feel the second of these is very important for becoming even remotely adept at using Git, which is why
I spend so much time talking about it. Yes, you can get by with a cheat-sheet of common Git commands,
but if you want to fearlessly use the tool to its full effectiveness, you gotta learn the internals!

2.1 What is Git?

Git is a source code control system, also known as a version control system.
Clear? OK, not really? Let’s dive in a bit more, then!
Git’s main job is to keep a log of snapshots of the current state of all your source code in a particular
directory tree.
The idea is that you’ll make some changes (to implement a feature, for example), and then you’ll commit
those changes to the source code repo (repository) once the feature is ready. This saves the changes to the
repo and allows other collaborators to see them.
And if you ever change something you didn’t want to, or your want to see how things were implemented
in the past, you can always check out a previous commit and take a look.
Git keeps a history of all the commits you’ve ever made. Assuming nothing criminal is happening, this
should be a great relief to you; if you accidentally delete a bunch of code, you can look at a previous
commit and get it all back.
But that’s not all! As we’ll see, Git also works well as a remote backup mechanism, and works wonderfully
when cooperating with a team on the same codebase.
Definitions:
• Source Code Control System/Version Control System: Software that manages changes to a soft-
ware project potentially consisting of thousands of source files edited by potentially hundreds of
developers. Git is a source code control system. There are many others.
• Commit: An explicit moment in time where a snapshot of the contents of all the source files are
recorded in the source code control system. Very, very typically the code is in a working state when
the commit is made; in other words, the commit represents in some ways a seal of approval that the
repo in this state is in working order even if the changes aren’t complete.
Example commits might be:
• “Added feature X to the codebase.”

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Chapter 2. Git Basics 5

• “Fixed bug Y.”

• “Merged other contributor’s changes into the codebase.”
• “Partially completed the Spanish translation.”
• Repo/Source Code Repository: This is where a particular software project is stored in the source
code control system. Typically each project has its own repo. For example, you might “create a Git
repo” to hold a new project you’re working on.
Sometimes repos are local to your computer, and sometimes they’re stored on other, remote com-
puters.
• Check out: To look at a particular commit (or branch—more later).

2.2 What is GitHub?

GitHub1 is not Git.

2.3 What is GitHub?

Oh, more?
GitHub is a website that provides a front end to a lot of Git features, and some additional GitHub-specific
features, as well.
It also provides remote storage for your repo, which acts as a backup.
Takeaway: GitHub is a web-based front-end to Git (specifically one that works on the copy of your repo
at GitHub—stay tuned for more on that later).

What about GitLib and Gitea? GitLaba is a competitor to GitHub. Giteab is an open-source
competitor that allows you to basically run a GitHub-like front-end on your own server. None of
this information is immediately important.
a
https://gitlab.com
b
https://docs.gitea.com/

Regardless of whatever repos you have on GitHub, you’ll also have copies (known as clones) of those
repos on your local system for you to work on. Periodically, in a common workflow, you’ll sync your
copy of the repo with GitHub.
You don’t need GitHub. Even though you might be commonly using GitHub, there’s no law that
says you have to. You can just create and destroy repos on your local system all you want, even if
you’re not connected to the Internet. See Appendix: Making a Playground for more information
once you’re more comfortable with the basics.

2.4 The Most Basic Git Workflow

There’s a super-common workflow that you’ll use repeatedly:
1. Clone a remote repo. The remote repo is commonly on GitHub, but not necessarily.
2. Make some local changes in your working tree, where the project files are on your computer.
3. Add those changes to the stage (AKA the index).
4. Commit those changes.
5. Push your changes back to the remote repo.
6. Go back to Step 2.
This is not the only workflow; there are others that are also not uncommon.
Definitions:
• Clone (verb): to make a copy of a remote repo locally.
1
https://github.com/
Chapter 2. Git Basics 6

• Clone (noun): a local copy of a remote repo.

• Remote: In Git, a clone of a repo in another location.
• Working Tree: The directory that you go into to edit and change the files of the project. This is
created when you clone.
• Stage: In Git, a place you add copies of files to in preparation for a commit. The commit will
include all the files that you’ve placed on the stage. It will not include files you haven’t placed on
the stage, even if you’ve modified those files.
• Index: A less-common name for the stage.

2.5 What is Cloning?

First, some backstory.
Git is what’s known as a distributed version control system. This means that, unlike many version control
systems, there’s no one central authority for the data. (Though commonly Git users treat a site like GitHub
in this regard, loosely.)
Instead, Git has clones of repos. These are complete, standalone copies of the entire commit history of
that repo. Any clone can be recreated from any other. None of them are more powerful than any others.
Looking back at The Most Basic Git Workflow, above, we see that Step 1 is to clone an existing repo.
If you’re doing this from GitHub, it means you’re making a local copy of an entire, existing GitHub repo.
Making a clone is a one time-process, typically (though you can make as many as you want).
Definitions:
• Distributed Version Control System: A VCS in which there is no central authority of the data,
and multiple clones of a repo exist.
This means after you clone a repo, there are two: one that is remote, and one that is local to your
computer.
These clones are completely separate and changes you make to your local repo will not be reflected
in the remote clone. Unless, that is, you explicitly make them interact.

2.6 How Do Clones Interact?

After you make a clone, there are two major operations you typically use:
• Push: This takes your local commits and uploads them to the remote repo.
• Pull: This takes the remote commits and downloads them to your local repo.
Behind the scenes, there’s a process going on called a merge, but we’ll talk more about that later.
Until you push, your local changes aren’t visible on the remote repo.
Until you pull, the changes on the remote repo aren’t visible on your local repo.

2.7 Actual Git Usage

Let’s put all this into play. This section assumes you have the command line Git tools installed. It also
generally assumes you’re running a Unix shell like Bash or Zsh.
Where do you get these shells? Linux/BSD/Unix and Mac users will already have these shells.
Recommendation for Windows users is to install and run Ubuntu with WSLa to get a virtual Linux
installation.
a
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/
Chapter 2. Git Basics 7

For this example, we’ll assume we have a GitHub repo already in existence that we’re going to clone.
Recall the process in The Most Basic Git Workflow, above:
1. Clone a remote repo. The remote repo is commonly on GitHub, but not necessarily.
2. Make some local changes.
3. Add those changes to the stage.
4. Commit those changes.
5. Push your changes back to the remote repo.
6. Go back to Step 2.

2.7.1 Step 0: One-time Setup

“Wait! You didn’t say there was a Step 0!”
Yes, one time, before you start using Git, you should tell it what your name and email address are. These
will be attached to the commits you make to the repo.
You can change them any time in the future, and you can even set them on a per-repo basis. But for now,
let’s set them globally so Git doesn’t complain when you make a commit.
You just have to do this once then never again (unless you want to).
Type both of these on the command line, filling in the appropriate information.

In this guide, things you type at the shell prompt are indicated by a prefaced $. Don’t type
the $; just type what follows it. Your actual shell prompt might be % or $ or something else, but
here we use the $ to indicate it.

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name"

$ git config --global user.email "your-email@example.com"

If you need to change them in the future, just run those commands again.

2.7.2 Step 1: Clone an Existing Repo

Let’s clone a repo! Here’s an example one you can actually use. Don’t worry–you can’t mess anything
up on the remote repo even though (and because) you don’t own it.
Like we said before, this isn’t the only workflow. Sometimes people make a local repo first,
add some commits, then create a remote repo and push those commits. But for this example, we’ll
assume the remote repo exists first, though this isn’t a requirement.
Switch in a subdirectory where you want the clone created. This command will create a new subdirectory
out of there that will hold all the repo files.
(In the example, anything that begins with $ represents the shell prompt indicating this is input, not output.
Don’t type the $; just type in the part after it.)

$ git clone https://github.com/beejjorgensen/git-example-repo.git

You should see some output similar to this:

Cloning into 'git-example-repo'...

remote: Enumerating objects: 4, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 4 (delta 0), reused 4 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (4/4), done.

Congratulations! You have a clone of the repo. Let’s have a peek:

Chapter 2. Git Basics 8

$ cd git-example-repo
$ ls -la

And we see a number of files:

total 16
drwxr-xr-x 5 user user 160 Jan 26 11:50 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 user user 448 Jan 26 11:50 ..
drwxr-xr-x 12 user user 384 Jan 26 11:50 .git
-rw-r--r-- 1 user user 65 Jan 26 11:50 README.md
-rwxr-xr-x 1 user user 47 Jan 26 11:50 hello.py

There are two files in this repo: README.md and hello.py.

The directory .git has special meaning; it’s the directory where Git keeps all its metadata and
commits. You can look in there, but you don’t have to. If you do look, don’t change anything. The
only thing that makes a directory a Git repo is the presence of a valid .git directory within it.

Let’s ask Git what it things the current status of the local repo is:

$ git status

Gives us:

On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

nothing to commit, working tree clean

There’s a lot of information here, surprisingly.

We haven’t talked about branching yet, but this is letting us know we’re on branch main. That’s fine for
now.
It also tells us this branch is up to date with a branch called origin/main. A branch in Git is just a
reference to a certain commit that’s been made, like a PostIt note attached to that commit. (Recall that a
commit is a snapshot of the code repo at some time.)
We don’t want to get caught up in the intricacies of branching right now, but bear with me for a couple
paragraphs.
origin is an alias for the remote repository that we originally cloned from, so origin/main is “branch
main on the repo you originally cloned from”.

There is one important thing to notice here: there are two main branches. There’s the main branch on
your local repo, and there’s a corresponding main branch on the remote (origin) repo.
Remember how clones are separate? That is, changes you make on one clone aren’t automatically visible
on the other? This is an indication of that. You can make changes your your local main branch, and these
won’t affect the remotes origin/main branch. (At least, not until you push those changes!)
Lastly, it mentions we’re up-to-date with the latest version of origin/main (that we know of), and that
there’s nothing to commit because there are no local changes. We’re not sure what that means yet, but it
all sounds like vaguely good news.

2.7.3 Step 2: Make Some Local Changes

Let’s edit a file and make some changes to it.
Again, don’t worry about messing up the remote repo—you don’t have permissions to do that.
Your safety is completely assured from a Git perspective.
 Chapter 2. Git Basics 9

If you’re using VS Code, you can run it in the current directory like so:

$ code .

Otherwise, open the code in your favorite editor, which, admit it, is Vim2 .
Let’s change hello.py:
It was:

1 #!/usr/bin/env python
2

3 print("Hello, world!")

but let’s add a line so it reads:

1 #!/usr/bin/env python
2

3 print("Hello, world!")
4 print("Hello, again!")

And save that file.

Let’s ask Git what the status is now.

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes not staged for commit:

(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
modified: hello.py

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

This is telling us a couple important things.

First, Git has detected that we modified a file, namely hello.py, which we did.
But it also says there are no changes added to commit (i.e. “there is nothing to make a commit with”).
What does that mean?
It means we haven’t added anything to the stage yet. Recall that the stage is where we can place items
that we wish to include in the next commit. Let’s try that.

2.7.3.1 Step 2.1: Reviewing Your Changes

We’re going to divert for just a moment to briefly introduce a new optional tool: git diff (short for
“difference”, though we still pronounce it “diff”).
If you make some changes to files and you need a refresher on all the things you’ve changed, you can run
this command to see it. But, fair warning, the output is… esoteric.
Let’s try it.

$ git diff
diff --git a/hello.py b/hello.py

2
https://www.vim.org/
Chapter 2. Git Basics 10

index 42cc1f7..532d33e 100644

--- a/hello.py
+++ b/hello.py
@@ -1,4 +1,5 @@
#!/usr/bin/env python

print("Hello, world!")
+print("Hello, again!")

What the heck is this sorcery? If you’re lucky, it got color-coded for you with (by convention) added lines
in green and deleted lines in red.
For now, just notice a couple things:
1. The file name. We see this change was to hello.py.
2. The line with the + at the front. This indicates an added line.
A - at the front of a line would indicate the line was deleted. And changed lines are often shown as the
old line being deleted and a new one added.
Finally, if you want to see the diff for things you’ve added to the stage already (in the next step), you can
run git diff --staged.
We’ll dive more into diff later, but I wanted to introduce it here since it’s so useful.

2.7.4 Step 3: Add Changes to the Stage

The Git status message, above, is trying to help us out. It says:

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

It’s suggesting that git add will add things to the stage—and it will.
Now we, the developers, know that we modified hello.py, and that we’d like to make a commit that
reflects the changes to that file. So we need to first add it to the stage so that we can make a commit.
Let’s do it:

$ git add hello.py

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: hello.py

Now it’s changed from saying “Changes not staged for commit” to saying “Changes to be committed”, so
we have successfully copied hello.py to the stage!
There’s also a helpful message there about how to unstage the file. Let’s say you accidentally
added it to the stage and you changed your mind and wanted to not include it in the commit after
all. You can run

$ git restore --staged hello.py

and that will change it back to the “Changes not staged for commit” state.
Chapter 2. Git Basics 11

2.7.5 Step 4: Commit those Changes

Now that we have something copied to the stage, we can make a commit. Recall that a commit is just a
snapshot of the state of the repo given the modified files on the stage. Modified files not on the stage will
not be included in the snapshot. Unmodified files are automatically included in the snapshot.
In short, the commit snapshot will contain all the unmodified files Git currently tracks plus the modified
files that are on the stage.
Let’s do it:

$ git commit -m "I added another print line"

[main 0e1ad42] I added another print line
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

The -m switch allows you to specify a commit message. If you don’t use -m, you’ll be popped
into an editor, which will probably be Nano or Vim, to edit the commit message. If you’re not
familiar with those, see Getting Out of Editors for help.
If you do get into the editor, know that every line in the commit message that begins with # is a
comment that is ignored for the purposes of the commit. It’s a little weird that the commit message
is a comment about the commit, and then you can have commented-out lines in the comment, but
I don’t make the rules!
And that’s good news! Let’s check the status:

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/main' by 1 commit.
(use "git push" to publish your local commits)

nothing to commit, working tree clean

“Nothing to commit, working tree clean” means we have no local changes to our branch.
But look! We’re “ahead of ‘origin/main’ by 1 commit”! This means our local commit history on the main
branch has one commit that the remote commit history on its main branch does not have.
Which makes sense—the remote repo is a clone and so it’s independent of our local repo unless we ex-
plicitly try to sync them up. It doesn’t magically know that we’ve made changes to our local repo.
And Git is helpfully telling us to run git push if we want to update the remote repo so that it also has our
changes.
So let’s try to do that. Let’s push our local changes to the remote repo.

2.7.6 Step 5: Push Your Changes to the Remote Repo

Let’s push our local changes to the remote repo:

$ git push

And that produces:

Username for 'https://github.com':

Uh oh—trouble brewing. Let’s try entering our credentials:

Username for 'https://github.com': my_username

Password for 'https://beejjorgensen@github.com': [my_password]
remote: Support for password authentication was removed on August
Chapter 2. Git Basics 12

13, 2021.
remote: Please see https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/getting-
started-with-git/about-remote-repositories#cloning-with-
https-urls for information on currently recommended modes
of authentication.
fatal: Authentication failed for 'https://github.com/beejjorgensen/
git-example-repo.git/'

Well, that’s all kinds of not-working. Largely this is because you don’t have permission to write to that
repo since you’re not the owner. And, notably, support for authenticating with a password seems to have
been removed in 2021 which, last I checked, was in the past.
So what do we do? Firstly, we should be the owner of the GitHub repo that we’ve cloned and that’ll solve
some of the permission problems. Secondly, we’d better find another way to authenticate ourselves to
GitHub that’s not plain password.
Let’s try that in the next section.
Chapter 3

GitHub: How To Use It

Now, we’ve said that GitHub (which is a proprietary web front-end to Git run and owned by Microsoft)
is not Git, and it’s true. It’s also true that you never even need to touch GitHub in order to use Git.
That said, it’s really common for people to use GitHub, so we’ll get it set up in this chapter.
Here we’ll make a new GitHub account and see how authentication works. This involves some one-time
setup.
If you already have a GitHub account, you can skip that section.
If you already have authentication set up with GitHub CLI or with SSH keys, you can skip that section,
as well.
If you don’t need to use GitHub, you can skip the entire chapter!

3.1 Making a GitHub Account

Head on over to GitHub1 and click Sign Up. Follow those instructions.
Eventually you’ll end up on your home screen dashboard.

3.2 Creating a New Repo on GitHub

This will make a repository on GitHub that you own. It does not make a local repository—you’ll have to
clone the repo for that, something we’ll do later.
In GitHub, there’s a blue New button on the left of the dashboard.
Also, there’s a + pulldown on the upper right center that has a “New Repository” option. Click one of
those.
On the subsequent page:
1. Enter a “Repository name”, which can be anything as long as you don’t already have a repo by that
name. Let’s use test-repo for this example.
2. Check the “Add a README file” checkbox.
(In the future, you might already have a local repo you’re going to push to this new repo. If that’s
the case, do not check this box or it’ll prevent the push from happening.)
3. Click Create repository at the bottom.
And there you have it.
1
https://github.com/

13
Chapter 3. GitHub: How To Use It 14

3.3 Authentication
Before we get to cloning, let’s talk authentication. In the previous part of the intro, we say that user-
name/password logins were disabled, so we have to do something different.
There are a couple options:
• Use a tool called GitHub CLI
• Use SSH keys
• Use Personal Authentication Tokens
GitHub CLI is likely easier. SSH keys are geektacular. I only recently learned that you could authentica-
tion with personal access tokens, so I can’t really speak to them much.
Personally, I use SSH keys. But other people… don’t. It’s up to you.
If you already have authentication working with GitHub, skip these sections.

3.3.1 GitHub CLI

This is a command line interface to GitHub. It does a number of things, but one of them is providing an
authentication helper so you can do things like actually push to a remote repo.
Visit the GitHub CLI page2 and follow the installation instructions. If you’re using WSL, Linux, or another
Unix variant, see their installation instructions3 for other platforms.
Once you have it installed, you should be able to run ‘gh –version’ and see some version information, e.g.:

$ gh --version
gh version 2.42.1 (2024-01-15)
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.42.1

Then you’ll want to run the following two commands:

$ gh auth setup-git
$ gh auth login

The first is one-time only.

The second command will take you through the login process. You’ll have to do this again if you log out.
When choosing the authentication type between SSH and HTTPS, I recommend SSH. You’ll need to
remember your choice when you go to clone a repo later.

3.3.2 SSH Keys

If you don’t want to install and use GitHub CLI, you can take this approach instead. This is more involved,
but has more geek cred. This is what I use.
If you already have an SSH keypair, you can skip the key generation step. You’d know you had one if
you ran ls ~/.ssh and you saw a file like id_rsa.pub or id_ed25519.pub.
To make a new keypair, run the following command:

$ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C youremail@example.com

(The -C sets a “comment” in the key. It can be anything, but an email address is common.)
This results in a lot of prompts, but you can just hit ENTER for all of them.

2
https://cli.github.com/
3
https://github.com/cli/cli#installation
Chapter 3. GitHub: How To Use It 15

Best practice is to use a password to access this key, otherwise anyone with access to the private
key can impersonate you and access your GitHub account, and any other account you have set up
to use that key. But it’s a pain to type the password every time you want to use the key (which is
any time you do anything with GitHub from the command line), so people use a key agent which
remembers the password for a while.
If you don’t have a password on your key, you’re relying on the fact that no one can get a copy
of the private portion of your key that’s stored on your computer. If you’re confident that your
computer is secure, then you don’t need a password on the key. Do you feel lucky?
Setting up the key agent is outside the scope of this document, and the author in unsure of how it
even works in WSL. GitHub has documentation on the mattera .
For this demo, we’ll just leave the password blank. All of this can be redone with a new key with
a password if you choose to do that later.
a
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-github-with-ssh/generating-a-new-ssh-key-and-adding-it-to-
the-ssh-agent

Anyway, just hitting ENTER for all the prompts gets you something like this:

Generating public/private ed25519 key pair.

Enter file in which to save the key (/home/user/.ssh/id_ed25519):
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in id_ed25519
Your public key has been saved in id_ed25519.pub
The key fingerprint is:
SHA256:/lrT43BQBRPJpUXxpTBFInhdtZSQjQwxU4USwt5c0Lw user@locahost
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ED25519 256]--+
| .o.X^%^=+|
| ..oo*^.=o|
| ..o = o..|
| . + E |
| S . |
| . o |
| . + + |
| o = . |
| ... . |
+----[SHA256]-----+

If you chose any file name other than the default for your key, you’ll have to do some additional
configuration to get it to work with GitHuba .
a
https://www.baeldung.com/linux/ssh-private-key-git-command

What’s that randomart thing with all the weird characters? It’s a visual representation of that
key. There are ways to configure SSH so that you see the randomart every time you log in, say.
And the idea is that if one day you see it looks different, something could be amiss security-wise.
I doubt most people every look at it again once it’s been generated, though.
Now if you type ls ~/.ssh you should see something like this:

id_ed25519 id_ed25519.pub

The first file is your private key. This is never to be shared with anyone. You have no reason to even copy
it.
The second file is your public key. This can be freely shared with anyone, and we’re going to share it with
GitHub in a second so that you can log in with it.
Chapter 3. GitHub: How To Use It 16

If you have trouble in the following subsections, try running these two commands:

$ chmod 700 ~/.ssh

$ chmod 600 ~/.ssh/*

You only have to do that once, but SSH can be a bit picky if the file permissions on those files
aren’t locked down.
Now in order to make this work, you have to tell GitHub what your public key is.
First, get a copy of your public key in the clipboard. Be sure you’re getting the file with the .pub
extension!

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

You should see something like this:

ssh-ed25519 AAAC3N[a bunch of letters]V+znpoO youremail@example.com

Copy the entire thing into the clipboard so you can paste it later.
Now go to GitHub, and click on your icon in the upper right.
Choose “Settings”.
Then on the left, choose “SSH and GPG keys”.
Click “New SSH Key”.
For the title, enter something identifying, like, “My laptop key”.
Key type is “Authentication Key”.
Then paste your key into the “Key” field.
And click “Add SSH key”.
We’ll be using SSH to clone URLs later. Remember that.

3.3.3 Using Personal Access Tokens

Remember last chapter when we tried to clone an HTTPS repo URL on the command line and it prompted
for a username and password that didn’t work?
Well, we get actually make new passwords that will work in that case. They’re called personal access
tokens.
GitHub has a lot of documentation on this4 but the gist of it is that you’re going to create a token that
represents some kind of access, e.g. “ability to read and write my repos”, and you’re going to use that in
lieu of the password on the command line.
So that last failed example would look like this:

Username for 'https://github.com': [MY USERNAME]

Password for 'https://beejjorgensen@github.com': [MY TOKEN]

In other words:
1. Generate a token.
2. Use that token as your password.
Your computer might automatically save those credentials so you don’t have to enter them every time. Or
it might not.
4
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-account-and-data-secure/managing-your-personal-access-tokens
Chapter 3. GitHub: How To Use It 17

One of the main things personal access tokens can give you is fine-grained control over access. You can
limit access to read-only, or just to certain repos, and so on.
Additionally, you can use GitHub CLI authentication with a token, as well. You just have to feed it in
there on standard input. Let’s say you have your token in a file called mytoken.txt. You can authenticate
with GitHub CLI like so:

$ gh auth login --with-token < mytoken.txt

Like with SSH keys, if you lose a laptop that uses a particular access token, you can simply invalidate that
token through GitHub’s UI so that mean people can’t use it.

3.4 Make a Local Clone of the Repo

We need to figure out the URL to the repo so we can clone it.
If you click on your icon in the upper right, then “My Repositories”, you should see a page with all your
repos. At this point, it might just be your test-repo repo. Click on the name.
And you should then be on the repo page. You can browse the files here, among other things, but really
we want to get the clone URL.
Click the big blue “Code” button.
What you do next depends on if you’re using GitHub CLI or SSH keys.

3.4.1 Cloning from GitHub with GitHub CLI

You have two options.
• Option 1: Earlier when we authenticated with gh auth login I said to remember if you chose
HTTPS or SSH. Depending on which you chose, you should choose that tab on this window.
Copy the URL.
Go to the command line and run git clone [URL] where [URL] is what you copied. So it’ll be
this for HTTPS:

$ git clone https://github.com/user/test-repo.git

or this for SSH:

$ git clone git@github.com:user/test-repo.git

• Option 2: Choose the “GitHub CLI” tab. Run the command as they have it, which will be something
like:

$ gh repo clone user/test-repo

3.4.2 Cloning from GitHub with SSH Keys

If you set up an SSH key earlier, you can use this method.
After hitting the blue “Code” button, make sure the “SSH” tab is selected.
Copy that URL.
Go to the command line and run git clone [URL] where [URL] is what you copied. So it’ll be something
like this:

$ git clone git@github.com:user/test-repo.git

Chapter 3. GitHub: How To Use It 18

3.5 Make Changes and Push!

Now that you’ve cloned the repo, you should be able to cd into that directory, edit a file, git add it to the
stage, then git commit -m message to make a commit…
And then git push to push it back to the clone on GitHub!
And after that if you go to the repo page on GitHub and hit reload, you should be able to see your changes
there!
And now we’re back to that standard common flow:
1. Clone a remote repo.
2. Make some local changes.
3. Add those changes to the stage.
4. Commit those changes.
5. Push your changes back to the remote repo.
6. Go back to Step 2.

3.6 Collaboration on GitHub

There are two main techniques for this:
1. Fork/pull request
2. Add a collaborator
We’ll talk about the first one in the future.
For now, the easiest way to add collaborators is to just add them to your repo.
On the repo page on GitHub, choose “Settings”, then “Collaborators” on the left.
After authenticating, you can click “Add people”. Enter the username of the person you want to collaborate
with.
They’ll have to accept the invitation from their GitHub inbox, but then they’ll have access to the repo.
Be sure to only do this with people you trust!
Chapter 4

The Git Log and HEAD

When we make commits to a Git repo, it tracks each of those commits in a log that you can visit. Let’s
take a look at that now.

4.1 An Example Log

You can get the commit log by typing git log.
Let’s say I’m in a repo with a single commit, where I’ve just added a file with the commit message
“Added”.

$ git log

produces:

commit 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2 (HEAD -> main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 09:24:52 2024 -0800

Added

If I make another commit, we get a longer log:

commit 5e8cb52cb813a371a11f75050ac2d7b9e15e4751 (HEAD -> main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 12:36:13 2024 -0800

More output

commit 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 09:24:52 2024 -0800

Added

Notice that the most recent commit entry is at the top of the output.

4.2 What’s in the log?

There are a few things to notice in the log:
• The commit comment

19
Chapter 4. The Git Log and HEAD 20

• The date
• The user who made the commit
Also we have those huge hex1 numbers after the word commit.
This is the commit ID or commit hash. This is universally unique number that you can use to identify a
particular commit.
Normally you don’t need to know this, but it can be useful for going back in time or keeping track of
commits in multideveloper projects.
We also see a bit at the top that says (HEAD -> main). What’s that about?

4.3 The HEAD Reference

We’ve seen that each commit has a unique and unwieldy identifier like this:
5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2

Luckily, there are a few ways to refer to commits with more human symbolic names.
HEAD is one of these references. It indicates which branch or commit you’re looking at right now in your
project subdirectory. Remember how we said you could go look at previous commits? The way you do
that is by moving HEAD to them.

We haven’t talked about branches yet, but the HEAD normally refers to a branch. By default,
it’s the main branch. But since we’re getting ahead of ourselves, I’m going to just keep saying that
HEAD refers to a commit, even though it usually does it indirectly via a branch.

So this is a bit of a lie, but I hope you forgive me.

Some terminology: the files in your git subdirectory you’re looking at right now is referred to as your
working tree. The working tree is the files as they appear at the commit pointed to by HEAD, plus any
uncommitted changes you might have made.
So if you switch HEAD to another commit, the files in your working tree will be updated to reflect that.
Okay, then, how do we know which commit HEAD is referring to? Well, it’s right the at the top of the log:

commit 5e8cb52cb813a371a11f75050ac2d7b9e15e4751 (HEAD -> main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 12:36:13 2024 -0800

More output

We see HEAD right there on the first line, indicating that HEAD is referring to commit with ID:
5e8cb52cb813a371a11f75050ac2d7b9e15e4751

Again that’s a bit of a lie, though. The HEAD -> main means that HEAD is actually referring to the main
branch, and that main is referring to the commit. HEAD is therefore indirectly referring to the commit.
More on that later.

4.4 Going Back In Time and Detached HEAD

Here’s my full Git log:

commit 5e8cb52cb813a371a11f75050ac2d7b9e15e4751 (HEAD -> main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 12:36:13 2024 -0800

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal
Chapter 4. The Git Log and HEAD 21

More output

commit 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 09:24:52 2024 -0800

Added

If I look at the files, I’ll see the changes indicated by the “More output” commit. But let’s say I want to
go back in time to the previous commit and see what the files looked like then. How would I do that?
Maybe there were some changes that existed back in an earlier commit that had been since
removed, and you wanted to look at them, for example.
I can use the git checkout command to make that happen.
Let’s checkout the first commit, the one with ID 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2.
Now, I could say:

$ git checkout 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2

and that would work, but the rule is that you must specific at least 4 unique digits of the ID, so I could
have also done this:

$ git checkout 5a02

for the same result.

And that result is:

Note: switching to '5a02'.

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make
experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any
commits you make in this state without impacting any branches by
switching back to a branch.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create,

you may do so (now or later) by using -c with the switch command.
Example:

git switch -c <new-branch-name>

Or undo this operation with:

git switch -

Turn off this advice by setting config variable advice.detachedHead

to false

HEAD is now at 5a02fed Added

Looks sort of scary, but look—Git is telling us how to undo the operation if we want, and so there’s really
nothing to fear.
Let’s take a look around with git log:
Chapter 4. The Git Log and HEAD 22

commit 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2 (HEAD)

Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 09:24:52 2024 -0800

Added

That’s all! Just one commit?! Where’s the second commit I made? Is it gone forever?!
No. Everything is fine.
When you have HEAD at a certain commit, you’re looking at the world as it looked at that snapshot in time.
Future commits haven’t “happened” yet from this perspective. They are still out there, but you’ll have to
change back to them by name.
Also, do you see anything different about that first line that reads (HEAD)? That’s right: no main to be
seen.
That’s because the main branch is still looking at the latest commit, the one with the “More output” com-
ment. So we don’t see it from this perspective.

Remember earlier when I said it was a bit of a lie to say that HEAD points to a commit? Well,
detached head state is the case where it actually does. Detached head state is just what happens
when HEAD is pointing to a commit instead of a branch. To reattach it, you have to change it to
point to a branch again.
Let’s get back to the main branch. There are three options:
1. git switch -, just like the helpful message says.
2. git switch main
3. git checkout main
Git replies:

Previous HEAD position was 5a02fed Added

Switched to branch 'main'

And now if we git log, we see all our changes again:

commit 5e8cb52cb813a371a11f75050ac2d7b9e15e4751 (HEAD -> main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 12:36:13 2024 -0800

More output

commit 5a02fede3007edf55d18e2f9ee3e57979535e8f2
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Feb 1 09:24:52 2024 -0800

Added

and our working tree will be updated to show the files as they are in the main commit.

4.5 The New Command: git switch

In ye olden days, git checkout did a lot of things, and it still does. Because it does so much, the main-
tainers of Git have been trying to break some of that functionality into a new command, git switch.
We could redo the previous section by using just git switch instead of git checkout. Let’s try:

$ git switch 5a02

Chapter 4. The Git Log and HEAD 23

and it says:

fatal: a branch is expected, got commit '5a02'

hint: If you want to detach HEAD at the commit, try again with the
--detach option.

Hmmm! git switch is warning us that we’re about to go into detached head state, and is that what we
really want? It’s not a crime or anything to do so, but it’s just letting us know that we’re not going to be
on a branch any longer.
So we can override, just like it suggests:

$ git switch --detach 5a02

HEAD is now at 5a02fed Added

All right! No big message about being detached, but we don’t need it because we know it’s detached since
we specified.
And like before, we can get back to the main branch with either:
1. git switch -, switch to the previous state
2. git switch main
Easy.

4.6 Commits Relative to HEAD

There are a couple shortcuts to get to commits that are earlier than HEAD, like, “I want to switch to the 3rd
commit before this one.”
Here’s a pretty-useless example that we’ll start with:

$ git switch --detach HEAD

This moves HEAD to where HEAD was. That is, it moves it nowhere. (Though it does have the effect of
detaching it from the branch.)
But what if I wanted to move to the commit right before where HEAD is now? You can do it with caret
notation like this:

$ git switch --detach HEAD^

And that gets you to the previous commit.

What if you wanted to get to the third-previous commit? You can add more carets!

$ git switch --detach HEAD^^^

Or the 10th-previous commit!

$ git switch --detach HEAD^^^^^^^^^^

Or the 100th-previous commit!

$ git switch --detach HEAD^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^forget this

Typing all these carets is wearing me out. Luckily there’s another shorthand we have at our disposal with
tilde notation. The two following lines are equivalent:
Chapter 4. The Git Log and HEAD 24

$ git switch --detach HEAD^^^

$ git switch --detach HEAD~3

After the tilde, you can just give the number of commits back you want to go. So back to my example:

$ git switch --detach HEAD~100 # Much easier

All this said, personally I usually just look at the log and go to a specific commit instead of counting back.
“But that’s just, like, my opinion, man.”
—The Dude
Chapter 5

Branches and Fast-Forward Merges

5.1 What is a Branch?

Normally you think of writing code as a linear sequence of changes. You start with an empty file, add
some things, test them, add some more, test some more, and eventually the code is complete.

Figure 5.1: A simple commit graph.

In Git we might think of this as a sequence of commits. Let’s look at a graph (Figure 5.1) where I’ve
numbered commits 1-5. There, (1) was the first commit we made on the repo, (2) is some changes we
made on top of (1), and (3) is some changes we made on top of (2), etc.
Git always keeps track of the parent commit for any particular commit, e.g. it knows the parent commit of
(3) is (2) in the above graph. In this graph, the parent relationship is indicated by an arrow. “The parent
of commit 3 is commit 2”, etc. It’s a little confusing because clearly commit 3 came after commit 2 in
terms of time, but the arrow points to the parent, which is the opposite of the nodes’ temporal relationship.
A branch is like a name tag stuck on one specific commit. You can move the name tag around with various
Git operations.
The default branch is called main.

The default branch used to be called master, and still is called that in some older repos.

Figure 5.2: The main branch on a commit.

So to make it a little more complete, we can show that branch in Figure 5.2. There’s our main branch
attached to the commit labeled (5).
It’s tempting to think of the whole sequence of commits as “the branch”, but this author recom-
mends against it. Better to keep in mind that the branch is just a name tag for a single commit, and
that we can move that name tag around.
But Git offers something more powerful, allowing you (or collaborators) to pursue multiple branches
simultaneously.
So there might be multiple collaborators working on the project at the same time.

25
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 26

Figure 5.3: Lots of branches.

And then, when you’re ready, you can merge those branches back together. In this diagram we’ve merged
commit 6 and 7 into a new commit, commit 9. In Figure 5.4, commit 9 contains the changes of both
commits 7 and 6.

Figure 5.4: After merging somebranch and anotherbranch.

In that case, somebranch and anotherbranch both point to the same commit. There’s no problem with
this.
And then we can keep merging if we want, until all the branches are pointing at the same commit (Figure
5.5).

Figure 5.5: After merging all branches.

And maybe after all this we decide to delete somebranch and anotherbranch; we can do this safely
because they’re fully merged, and can do this without affecting main or any commits (Figure 5.6).
This chapter is all about getting good with branching and partially good with merging.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 27

Figure 5.6: After deleting merged branches.

5.2 A Quick Note about git pull

When you do a pull, it actually does two things: (a) fetch all the changes from the remote repo and (b)
merge those changes.
If two or more people are committing to the same branch, eventually git pull is going to have to merge.
And it turns out there are a few ways it can do this.
For now, we’re going to tell git pull to always classically merge divergent branches, and you can do
that with this one-time command:

$ git config --global pull.rebase false

If you don’t do that, Git will pop up an error message complaining about it the first time it has to merge
on a pull. And you’ll have to do it then.
When we talk about rebasing later, this will make more sense.

5.3 HEAD and Branches

We said earlier that HEAD refers to a specific commit, namely the commit you’re looking at right now in
your working tree.
And we also said that was a bit of a lie.
In normal usage, HEAD points to a branch, not to a commit. In detached head state, HEAD points to a
commit.
It’s like Figure 5.7 when HEAD is pointing to a branch as per normal.

Figure 5.7: HEAD pointing to a branch.

But if we check out an earlier commit that doesn’t have a branch, we end up in detached head state, and
it looks like Figure 5.8.
So far, we’ve been making commits on the main branch without really even thinking about branching.
Recalling that the main branch is just a label for a specific commit, how does the main branch know to
“follow” our HEAD from commit to commit?
It does it like this: the branch the HEAD points to follows the current commit. That is, when you make a
commit, the branch HEAD points to moves along to that next commit.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 28

Figure 5.8: HEAD pointing to a commit.

If we were here back at Figure 5.7, when HEAD was pointing to the main branch, we could make one more
commit and get us to Figure 5.9.

Figure 5.9: HEAD moving with a branch.

Contrast that to detached head state, back in Figure 5.8. If we were there, a new commit would get us to
Figure 5.10, leaving main alone.

Figure 5.10: A commit with detached HEAD.

At this point, there’s nothing stopping you from creating a new branch at the same commit as HEAD, if
you want to do that. Or maybe you are just messing around and decide to switch back to main later,
abandoning the commits you’ve made in detached HEAD state.
Now that we have the abstract theory stuff laid out, let’s talk specifics.

5.4 Creating a Branch

When you make the first commit to a new repo, the main branch is automatically created for you at that
commit.
But what about new branches we want to make?
Why make a branch? A common case is that you want to work on your own commits without
impacting the work of others. (In this case you’re really just putting off the work until you merge
your branch with theirs, but it’s a good workflow.)
Another case is that you want to mess around with some changes but you’re not sure if they’ll work.
If they end up not working, you can just delete the branch. If they do work, you can merge your
changes back into the non-messing-around branch.
The most common way to make new branches is this:
1. Switch to the commit or branch from which you want to make the new branch.
2. Make the new branch there and switch HEAD to point to the new branch.
Let’s try it. Let’s branch off main.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 29

You might already have main checked out (i.e. HEAD points to main), but let’s do it again to be safe, and
then we’ll create a branch with git switch:

$ git switch main

$ git switch -c newbranch

Normally you can just switch to another branch (i.e. have HEAD point to that branch) with
git switch branchname. But if the branch doesn’t exist, you use the -c switch to create the
branch before switching to it.
ProTip: make sure all your local changes are committed before switching branches! If you
git status it should say “working tree clean” before you switch. Later we’ll learn about another
option with git stash.

So after checking out main, we have Figure 5.11.

Figure 5.11: HEAD pointing to main.

And then with git switch -c newbranch, we create and switch to newbranch, and that gets us to Figure
5.12.

Figure 5.12: HEAD pointing to newbranch.

That’s not super exciting, since we’re still looking at the same commit, but let’s see what happens when
we make some new commits on this new branch.
Important note: the branches we’re making here exist only on your local clone; they’re not au-
tomagically propagated back to wherever you cloned the repo from.
The upshot is that if you accidentally (or deliberately) delete your local repo, when you git clone
again, all your local branches will be gone (along with any commits that aren’t part of main or any
other branches pushed to the server).
There is a way to set up that connection where your local branches are uploaded when you push,
called remote-tracking branches. main is an example of a remote-tracking branch, which is why
git push from main works while git push from newbranch gives an error. But we’ll talk about
all this later.

5.5 Make Some Commits on a Branch

This is not really that different than what we were doing with our commits before. Before we made a
branch, we had HEAD pointing to main, and we were making commits on main.
Now we have HEAD pointing to newbranch and our commits will go there, instead.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 30

Right after creating newbranch, we had the situation in Figure 5.12. Now let’s edit something in the
working tree and make a new commit. With that, we’ll have the scenario in Figure 5.13.

Figure 5.13: Adding a new commit to newbranch.

Right? Let’s make another commit and get to Figure 5.14.

Figure 5.14: Adding another commit to newbranch.

We can see that newbranch and main are pointing at different commits.

If we wanted to see the state of the repo from main’s perspective, what would we have to do? We’d
have to git switch main to look at that branch.

Now for another question. Let’s say we’ve decided that we’re happy with the changes on newbranch,
and we want to merge them into the code in the main branch. How would we do that?

5.6 Merging: Fast-Forward

Bringing two branches back into sync is called merging.
The branch you’re on is the branch you’re bringing other changes into. That is, if you’re on Branch A, and
you tell give to Merge Branch B, Branch B’s changes will be applied onto Branch A. (Branch B remains
unchanged in this scenario.)
But in this section we’re going to be talking about a specific kind of merge: the fast-forward. This occurs
when the branch you’re merging from is a direct ancestor of the branch you’re merging into.
Let’s say we have newbranch checked out, like from the previous example in Figure 5.14.
I decide I want to merge main’s changes into newbranch, so (again, having newbranch checked out):

$ git merge main

Already up to date.

Nothing happened? What’s that mean? Well, if we look at the commit graph, above, all of main’s changes
are already in newbranch, since newbranch is a direct ancestor.
Git is saying, “Hey, you already have all the commits up to main in your branch, so there’s nothing for
me to do.”
But let’s reverse it. Let’s check out main and then merge newbranch into it.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 31

$ git switch main

Now we’ve moved HEAD to track main, as shown in Figure 5.15.

Figure 5.15: Checking out main again.

And newbranch is not a direct ancestor of main (it’s a descendant). So newbranch’s changes are not yet
in main.
So let’s merge them in and see what happens (your output may vary depending on what files are included
in the merge):

$ git merge newbranch

Updating 087a53d..cef68a8
Fast-forward
foo.py | 4 +++-
1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)

And now we’re at Figure 5.16.

Figure 5.16: After merging newbranch into main.

Wait a second—didn’t we say to merge newbranch into main, like take those changes and fold them into
the main branch? Why did main move, then?
We did! But let’s stop and think about how this can happen in the special case where the branch you’re
merging into is a direct ancestor of the branch you’re merging from.
It used to be that main didn’t have commits (5) or (6) in the graph, above. But newbranch has already
done the work of adding (5) and (6)!
The easiest way to get those commits “into” main is to simply fast-forward main up to newbranch’s
commit!
Again, this only works when the branch you’re merging into is a direct ancestor of the branch you’re
merging from.
That said, you certainly can merge branches that are not directly related like that, e.g. branches that share
a common ancestor but have both since diverged.
Git will automatically fast-forward if it can. Otherwise it does a “real” merge. And while fast-forward
merges can never lead to merge conflicts, regular merges certainly can.
But that’s another story.
Chapter 5. Branches and Fast-Forward Merges 32

5.7 Deleting a Branch

If you’re done merging your branch, it’s easy to delete it. Importantly this doesn’t delete any commits;
it just deletes the branch “label” so you can’t use it any longer. You can still use all the commits.
Let’s say we’ve finished the work on our topic1 branch and we want to merge it into main. No problem:

$ git commit -m "finished with topic1" # on topic1 branch

$ git switch main
$ get merge topic1 # merge topic1 into main

At this point, assuming a completed merge, we can delete the topic branch:

$ git branch -d topic1

Deleted branch topic1 (was 3be2ad2).

Done!
A topic branch is what we call a local branch made for a single topic like a feature, bug fix,
etc. In this guide I’ll name branches literally topic to indicate that it’s just an arbitrary branch. But
in real life you’d name the topic branch after what it is your doing, like bugfix37, newfeature,
experiment, etc.

But what if you were working on a branch and wanted to abandon it before you merge it into something?
For that, we have the more imperative Capital D option, which means, “I really mean it. Delete this
unmerged branch!”

$ git branch -D topic1

Use lowercase -d unless you have reason to do otherwise. It’ll at least tell you if you’re about to lose your
reference to your unmerged commits!
Chapter 6

Merging and Conflicts

We’ve seen how a fast-forward merge can bring to branches into sync with no possibility of conflict.
But what if we can’t fast-forward because two branches are not direct ancestors? In other words, what if
the branches have diverged?

6.1 An Example of Divergent Branches

Let’s look at a commit graph where things are still OK to fast-forward in Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.1: A direct ancestor branch.

Yes, I’ve bent the graph a bit there, but we can merge somebranch into main as a fast-forward because
main is a direct ancestor and somebranch is therefore a direct descendant.

But what if, before we merged, someone made another commit on the main branch? And now it looks
like it does in Figure 6.2.

Figure 6.2: Not a direct ancestor branch.

There’s a common ancestor at commit (2), but there’s no direct line of descent. main and somebranch
have diverged.
Is all hope lost? How can we merge?

33
Chapter 6. Merging and Conflicts 34

6.2 Merging Divergent Branches

Turns out you do it the exact same way as always.
1. Check out the branch you want to merge into.
2. git merge the branch you want to merge from.
In our Figure 6.2 example above, let’s say we’ve done this:

$ git switch main

$ git merge somebranch # into main

The # is a shell comment delimiter. You can paste that in if you want, but it does nothing.

The difference here is that Git can’t simply fast-forward. It has to somehow, magically, bring together the
changes from commit (7) and commit (8) even if they’re radically different than one other.
This means that after we bring those two commits together, the code will look like it’s never looked before,
a combination of two sets of changes.
And because it looks like it hasn’t before, we need another commit (another snapshot of the working tree)
to represent the joining of both sets of changes.
We call this the merge commit, and Git will automatically make it for you. (When this happens, you’ll see
an editor pop up with some text in it. This text is the commit message. Edit it (or just accept it as-is) and
save the file and exit the editor. See Getting Out of Editors if you need help with this.
So after our merge, we end up with Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.3: Creating a merge commit.

Commit labeled (9) is the merge commit. It contains both the changes from (8) and (7). And has the
commit message you saved in the editor.
And we see main has been updated to point to it. And that somebranch is unaffected.
Importantly, we see that commit (9) has two parents, the commits that were merged together to make it.
And look! If we want, we can now fast-forward somebranch to main because it’s now a direct ancestor!
In this example, Git was able to determine how to do the merge automatically. But there are some cases
where it cannot, and this results in a merge conflict that requires manual intervention. By you.

6.3 Merge Conflicts

If two branches have changes that are “far apart” from one another, Git can figure it out. If I edit line
20 of a file in one branch, and you edit line 3490 of the same file in another, Git can bring both edits in
automatically.
But let’s say I edit line 20 in one commit, and you edit line 20 (the same line) in another commit.
Chapter 6. Merging and Conflicts 35

Which one is “right”? Git has no idea because it’s just dumb software and doesn’t know our business
needs.
So it asks us, during the merge, to fix it. After we fix it, Git can complete the merge.
There’s an important point here. When you’re merging, if a conflict occurs, you’re still merging.
Git is is the “merge” state, waiting for more merge-specific commands.
You can resolve the conflict then commit the changes to complete the merge. Or you can back out
of the merge making as if you’d never started it in the first place.
The important point is that you’re aware Git is in a special state and you have to either complete
(or abort) the merge to get back to normal before you continue to use it.
Let’s have an example where both main and newbranch have added a line to end of file, i.e. they both
added line 4. Git doesn’t know which one is correct, so there’s a conflict.

$ git merge newbranch

Auto-merging foo.py
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo.py
Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

Now if I look at my status, I see we’re in merge state, as noted by You have unmerged paths. We’re in
the middle of merge; we have to either go out the front or back out the back to get back to normal.

$ git status
On branch main
You have unmerged paths.
(fix conflicts and run "git commit")
(use "git merge --abort" to abort the merge)

Unmerged paths:
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
both modified: foo.py

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

It’s also hinting that I can do one of two things:

1. Fix conflicts and run “git commit”.
2. Use “git merge –abort” to abort the merge.
The second just rolls back the merge making it as if I hadn’t run git merge in the first place.
So let’s focus on the first. What are these conflicts and how do I resolve them?

6.4 What a Conflict Looks Like

My error message above is telling me that foo.py has unmerged paths. So look at what’s happened with
that file.
Before I started any of this, the file foo.py only had this in it on branch main:

print("Commit 1")

And I added a line so it looked like this:

print("Commit 1")
print("Commit 4")

And committed it.

Chapter 6. Merging and Conflicts 36

But what I didn’t realize was that my teammate had also made another commit on newbranch that added
different lines to the bottom of the file.
So when I went to merge newbranch into main, I got this conflict. Git doesn’t know which additional
lines are correct.
Here’s where the fun begins. Let’s edit foo.py here in the middle of the merge and see what it looks
like:

print("Commit 1")
<<<<<<< HEAD
print("Commit 4")
=======
print("Commit 2")
print("Commit 3")
>>>>>>> newbranch

What the giblets is all that? Git has totally screwed with the contents of my file!
Yes, it has! But not for no reason; let’s examine what’s in there.
We have three delimiters: <<<<<<, ======, and >>>>>>.
Everything from the top delimiter to the middle one is what’s in HEAD (the branch you’re on and merging
into).
Everything from the middle delimiter to the bottom one is what’s in newbranch (the branch you’re merg-
ing from).
So Git has “helpfully” given us the information we need to make a semi-informed decision about what to
do.
And here’s exactly the steps we must follow:
1. Edit the conflicting file(s), remove all those extra lines, and make the file(s) Right.
2. Do a git add to add the file(s).
3. Do a git commit to finalize the merge.
Now, when I say “make the file Right”, what does that mean? It means that I need to have a chat with my
teammate and figure out what this code is supposed to do. We clearly have different ideas, and only one
of them is right.
So we have a chat and hash it out. We finally decide the file should look like this:

print("Commit 1")
print("Commit 4")
print("Commit 3")

And then I (since I’m the one doing the merge), edit foo.py and remove all the merge delimiters and
everything else, and make it look exactly like we agreed upon. I make it look Right.
Then I add the file to the stage and make a merge commit. (Here we’re manually making the merge
commit, unlike above where Git was able to automatically make it.)

$ git add foo.py

$ git status
On branch main
All conflicts fixed but you are still merging.
(use "git commit" to conclude merge)

Changes to be committed:
modified: foo.py
Chapter 6. Merging and Conflicts 37

Notice that git status is telling me we’re still in the merging state, but I’ve resolved the conflicts. It
tells me to git commit to finish the merge.
So let’s do that, making the merge commit:

$ git commit -m "Merged with newbranch"

[main 668b506] Merged with newbranch

And that’s it! Let’s check status just to be sure:

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Success!
Just to wrap up, let’s take a look at the log at this point:

$ git log
commit 668b5065aa803fa496951b70159474e164d4d3d2 (HEAD -> main)
Merge: e4b69af 81d6f58
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sun Feb 4 13:18:09 2024 -0800

Merged with newbranch

commit e4b69af05724dc4ef37594e06d0fd323ca1b8578
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sun Feb 4 13:16:32 2024 -0800

Commmit 4

commit 81d6f58b5982d39a1d92af06b812777dbb452879 (newbranch)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sun Feb 4 13:16:32 2024 -0800

Commmit 3

commit 3ab961073374ec26734c933503a8aa988c94185b
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sun Feb 4 13:16:32 2024 -0800

Commmit 1

We see a few things. One is that our merge commit is pointed to by main (and HEAD). And looking down
a couple commits, we see our now-direct ancestor, newbranch back on Commit 3.
We also see a Merge: line on that top commit. It lists the UUIDs for the two commits that it came from
(the first 7 digits, anyway).

6.5 Why Merge Conflicts Happen

Generally, it’s because you haven’t coordinated with your team about who is responsible for which pieces
of code. Generally two people shouldn’t be editing the same lines of code in the same file at once.
That said, there are absolutely cases where it does happen and is expected. The key is to communicate
with your team when resolving the conflict if you don’t know what is Right.
Chapter 6. Merging and Conflicts 38

6.6 Merging with IDEs or other Merge Tools

IDEs like VS Code might have a special merge mode where you can choose one set of changes or another,
or both. Likely “both” is what you want, but make an informed decision on the matter.
Also, even when selecting “both”, it could be that the editor puts them in the wrong order. It’s up to you
to make sure the file is Right before making the final commit to complete the merge.
You can do this by, after the tool has been used to merge, opening the file again in a new window and
making sure it’s as you want it, and editing it to be if it’s not.

6.7 Merge Big Ideas

DON’T PANIC! If you have a merge conflict, you can totally work it out. They’re a common occurrence,
and the more of them you do, the better at them you get.
Nothing to worry about. Everything is in Git’s commit history, so even if you botch it, you can always
get things back the way they were.
Chapter 7

Using Subdirectories with Git

This is a shorter chapter, but we want to talk about Git’s behavior when it comes to working in subdirec-
tories and some gotchas that you probably don’t want to get wrapped up in.

7.1 Repos and Subdirectories

When you run a git command, Git looks for a special directory called .git (“dot git”) in the current
directory. As we’ve already mentioned, this is the directory, created when you create the repo, that holds
the metadata about the repo.
But what if you’re in a subdirectory in your project, and there’s no .git directory there?
Git starts by looking in the current directory for .git. If it can’t find it there, it looks in the parent directory.
And if it’s not there, it looks in the grandparent, etc., all the way back to the root directory.

7.1.1 What about Subprojects?

One common student question is, “Should I make one single repo for CS101 with subdirectories for each
project? Or should I make a different repo for every project?”
Firstly, see if your instructor has a requirement or preference, but other than that, it doesn’t technically
matter which approach you use.
In real life, bigger repos (much bigger than you’ll typically be using for a class) take a lot longer to clone
due to their size.
What happens if you initialize a new Git repo inside an existing repo? It’s not great. Don’t do this.
For mixing and matching different repos in the same hierarchy, Git has the concept of submodules1 , but
that’s out of scope for this guide, and rarely used in school.

7.2 Accidentally Making a Repo in your Home Directory

Git won’t stop you from making a repo there, i.e. a repo that contains everything in all your directories.
But that’s probably not what you wanted to do.
How does one make this mistake? Usually it’s with git init . in your home directory. You can also
make this error by launching VS Code from your home directory and telling it to “Initialize Repository”
in that location.
This is particularly insidious because if you’re in a subdirectory that you think is a standalone repo, you
might have been misled since Git searches parent folder for the .git directory and it could be finding the
spurious one you accidentally made in your home directory.
1
https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Submodules

39
Chapter 7. Using Subdirectories with Git 40

We recommend against one big repo from your home directory. You should have separate subdirectories
for each of your repos.
If you accidentally create a repo where you didn’t want to, changing a Git repo to a regular subdirectory
is as simple as removing the .git directory. Be careful that you’re removing the correct one when you
do this!
One hack you can do to prevent Git from creating a repo in your home directory is to preemptively
put an unwriteable .git directory there.

$ mkdir ~/.git # Make the .git directory

$ chmod 000 ~/.git # Take away all permissions

This way when Git tries to make its metadata folder there, it’ll be stopped because you don’t have
write permission to that .git directory.

7.3 Empty Subdirectories in Repos

Turns out Git doesn’t support this. It only tracks files, so if you want a subdirectory represented in your
repo, you must have at least one file in it.
A common thing to do is add an empty file called .gitkeep (“dot git keep”) to the subdirectory, then
add it to the repo. This will cause Git to recreate the subdirectory when it clones or merges the .gitkeep
directory.

The file .gitkeep isn’t special in any way, other than convention. The file could be called anything.
For example, if you know you’ll need to eventually put a .gitignore in that directory, you might
just use that instead. Or a README.
Chapter 8

Ignoring Files with .gitignore

What if you have files in your subdirectory you don’t want Git to pay any attention to? Like maybe you
have some temporary files you don’t want to see in the repo. Or maybe you have an executable you built
from a C project and you don’t want that checked in because your incredibly strict instructor won’t grade
your project if the repo contains any build products? For example.
That’s what this part of the guide is all about.

8.1 Adding a .gitignore File

In any directory of a project, you can add a .gitignore (“dot gitignore”) file.
This is a simple textfile that contains a list of file names to ignore.
Let’s say I have a C project that builds and executable called “doom”. I wouldn’t want to check that into
my source repo because it’s not source, and it’s just a big binary that takes a bunch of disk.
But when I get the status, it’s annoying to see Git complaining about it:

$ git status
On branch main
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
doom

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git

add" to track)

So I edit a .gitignore file in that directory and add this one line to it:

doom

Now I run status again:

$ git status
On branch main
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
.gitignore

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git

add" to track)

41
Chapter 8. Ignoring Files with .gitignore 42

What? Same thing? Not quite! Read the fine print!

It used to be complaining that doom was untracked, but now it’s not complaining. So the .gitignore
worked. Woo hoo!
But Git has found another untracked file in the brand new .gitignore. So we should add that to the
repo.
Always put your .gitignore files in the repo unless you have a compelling reason not to. This way
they’ll exist in all your clones, which is handy.

$ git add .gitignore

$ git commit -m Added
[main 07582ad] Added
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 .gitignore

Now we get the status:

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

and we’re all clear.

8.2 Can I Specify Subdirectories in .gitignore?

Yes!
You can be as specific or as non-specific as you like with file matches.
Here’s a .gitignore looking for a very specific file:

subdir/subdir2/foo.txt

That will match anywhere in the project. If you want to only match a specific file from the project root,
you can prepend a slash:

/subdir/subdir2/foo.txt

Note that means subdir in the root of the project, not the root directory of your entire filesystem.

8.3 Where do I Put the .gitignore?

You can add .gitignore files to any subdirectories of your project. But how they behave depends on
where they are.
The rule is this: each .gitignore file applies to all the subdirectories below it.
So if you put a .gitignore in your project’s root directory that has foo.txt in it, every single foo.txt
in every subdirectory of your project will be ignored.
Use the highest-level .gitignore file to block things you know you don’t want anywhere in your project.
If you add additional .gitignore files to subdirectories, those only apply to that subdirectory and below.
The idea is that you start with the most broadly applicable set of ignored files in your project root, and
then get more specific in the subdirectories.
For simple projects, you’re fine just having one .gitignore in the project root directory.
Chapter 8. Ignoring Files with .gitignore 43

8.4 Wildcards
Do I have to individually list all the files I don’t want in the .gitignore? What a pain!
Luckily Git supports wildcards in ignored file naming.
For example, if we wanted to block all the files that ended with a .tmp or .swp (Vim’s temp file name)
extension, we could use the * (“splat”) wildcard for that. Let’s make a .gitignore that blocks those:

*.tmp
*.swp

And now any files ending with .tmp or .swp will be ignored.
Turns out that Vim has two kinds of swap files, .swp and .swo. So could we add them like this?

*.tmp
*.swo
*.swp

Sure! That works, but there’s a shorter way where you can tell Git to match any character in a bracketed
set. This is equivalent to the above:

*.tmp
*.sw[op]

You can read that last line as, “Match file names that begins with any sequence of characters, followed by
.sw, followed by either o or p.”

8.5 Negated .gitignore Rules

What if your root .gitignore is ignoring *.tmp files for the entire project. No problem.
But then later in development you have some deeply nested subdirectory that has a file needed.tmp that
you really need to get into Git.
Bad news, though, since *.tmp is ignored at the root level across all subdirectories in the project! Can
we fix it?
Yes! You can add a new .gitignore to the subdirectory with needed.tmp in it, with these contents:

!needed.tmp

This tells Git, “Hey, if you were ignoring needed.tmp because of some higher-up ignore rule, please stop
ignoring it.”
So while needed.tmp was being ignored because of the root level ignore file, this more-specific file
overrides that.
If you needed to allow all .tmp files in this subdirectory, you could use wildcards:

!*.tmp

And that would make it so all .tmp files in this subdirectory were not ignored

8.6 How To Ignore All Files Except a Few?

You can use the negated rules for that.
Here’s a .gitignore that ignores everything except files called *.c or Makefile:
Chapter 8. Ignoring Files with .gitignore 44

*
!*.c
!Makefile

The first line ignores everything. The next two lines negate that rule for those specific files.

8.7 Getting Premade .gitignore Files

Here’s a repo1 with a whole bunch.
But you can also roll your own as needed. Use git status often to see if any files are there you want to
ignore.
When you create a new repo on GitHub, it also gives you the option to choose a prepopulated .gitignore.
Warning! Only do this if you’re not planning to push an already-existing repo into this newly-made
GitHub repo. If you plan to do this, GitHub’s .gitignore will get in the way.

1
https://github.com/github/gitignore
Chapter 9

Remotes: Repos in Other Places

A remote is just a name for a remote server you can clone, push, and pull from.
We identify these by a URL; with GitHub, this is a URL we copied when we went to clone the repo
initially.
It’s possible to use this URL to identify the server in our Git usage, but it’s unwieldy to type. So we give
the remote server URLs nicknames that we just tend to call “remotes”.
A remote we’ve already seen a bunch of is origin. This is the nickname for the remote repo you cloned
from, and it gets set automatically by Git when you clone.

9.1 Remote and Branch Notation

Before we begin, note that Git uses slash notation to refer to a specific branch on a specific remote:
remotename/branchname.

For example, this refers to the main branch on the remote named origin:

origin/main

And this refers to the branch named feature3490 on a remote named nitfol:

nitfol/feature3490

We’ll talk more about this in the Remote Tracking Branches chapter.

9.2 Getting a List of Remotes

You can run git remote with the -v option in any repo directory to see what remotes you have for that
repo:

$ git remote -v
origin https://github.com/example-repo.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/example-repo.git (push)

We see that we’re using the same URL for the remote named origin for both push (part of which is
fetch) and pull. Having the same URL for both is super common.

And that URL is the exact same one we copied from GitHub when cloning the repo in the first place.

45
Chapter 9. Remotes: Repos in Other Places 46

9.3 Renaming a Remote

Remember that a remote name is just an alias for some URL that you cloned the repo from.
Let’s say that you are all set up with your SSH keys to use GitHub for both push and pull, but you
accidentally cloned the repo using the HTTPS URL. In that case, you’ll see the following remote:

$ git remote -v
origin https://github.com/example-repo.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/example-repo.git (push)

And then you try to push, and GitHub tells you that you can’t push to an HTTPS remote… dang it!
You meant to copy the SSH URL when you cloned, which for me looks like:

git@github.com:beejjorgensen/git-example-repo.git

Luckily it’s not the end of the world. We can just change what the alias points to.
(The example below is split into two lines so that it’s not too wide for the book, but it can be on a single
line. The backslash lets Bash know that the line continues.)

$ git remote set-url origin \

git@github.com:beejjorgensen/git-example-repo.git

And now when we look at our remotes, we see:

$ git remote -v
origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/git-example-repo.git (fetch)
origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/git-example-repo.git (push)

And now we can push! (Assuming we have our SSH keys set up.)

9.4 Adding a Remote

There’s nothing stopping you from adding another remote.
A common example is if you forked a GitHub Project (more on that later). A fork is a GitHub construct
that enables you to easily clone someone else’s public repo into your own account, and gives you a handy
way to share changes you make with the original repo.
Let’s say I forked the Linux source repo. When I clone my fork, I’ll see these remotes:

origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/linux.git (fetch)

origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/linux.git (push)

I don’t have access to the real Linux source code, but I can fork it and get my own copy of the repo.
Now, if Linus Torvalds makes changes to his repo, I won’t automatically see them. So I’d like some way
to get his changes and merge them in with my repo.
I need some way to refer to his repo, so I’m going to add a remote called reallinux that points to it:

$ git remote add reallinux https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git

Now my remotes look like this:

origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/linux.git (fetch)

origin git@github.com:beejjorgensen/linux.git (push)
Chapter 9. Remotes: Repos in Other Places 47

reallinux https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git (fetch)

reallinux https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git (push)

Normally when setting up a remote the refers to the source of a forked repo on GitHub, people
tend to call that remote upstream, whereas I’ve clearly called it reallinux.
I did this because when we subsequently talk about remote tracking branches, we’re going to use
“upstream” to mean something else, and I don’t want the two to be confusing.
Just remember IRL when you set up a remote to point to the forked-from repo, it’s relatively cus-
tomary to call that remote upstream.

Now I can run this to get all the changes from Linus’s repo:

$ git fetch reallinux

And I can merge it into my branch (the Linux repo uses master for the main branch):

$ git switch master # My local master

$ git merge reallinux/master # Note the slash notation!

That will merge the master branch from the reallinux into my local master, once we’ve dealt with any
conflicts.
At this point if I did a git log, I’d see that the latest commit would indicate that my HEAD was attached
to my master branch, and it was pointing to the same commit as the reallinux/master:

(HEAD -> master, reallinux/master)

This is expected, since I just merged reallinux/master into my master, so they definitely should be
pointing to the same commit.
But looking farther down, I’d see the master branch on my origin lagging behind a few commits:

(origin/master, origin/HEAD)

You might or might not have origin/HEAD depending on how you made your repo.

At this point I’d do a git push to get them all on the same commit, so the top commit would show:

(HEAD -> master, reallinux/master, origin/master, origin/HEAD)

And now we’re all happily pointing to the same commit.

It’s interesting that my local master can be out of sync from the master on origin, right?
We’ll look at this in the Remote Tracking Branches chapter.
Chapter 10

Remote Tracking Branches

We’ve seen how to create local branches that you do work on and then merge back into the main branch,
then git push it up to a remote server.
This part of the guide is going to try to clarify what’s actually going on behind the scenes, as well as give
us a way to push our local branches to a remote for safe keeping.

10.1 Branches on Remotes

First, some refresher!
Recall that the remote repo you cloned yours from is a complete copy of your repo. The remote repo has
a main branch, and therefore your clone also has a main branch.
That’s right! When you make a GitHub repo and then clone it, there are two main branches!
How do we differentiate them?
Well, on your local clone, we just refer to branches by their plain name. When we say main or topic2,
we mean the local branch by that name on our repo.
If we want to talk about a branch on a remote, we have to give the remote name along with the branch
using that slash notation we’ve already seen:

main # main branch on your local repo

origin/main # main branch on the remote named origin
upstream/main # main branch on the remote named upstream
zork/mailbox # mailbox branch on the remote named zork
mailbox # mailbox branch on your local repo

Importantly, not only do the words origin/main refer to the main branch on origin in casual conver-
sation, but you actually have a branch on your local repo called origin/main.
This is called a remote-tracking branch. It’s your local copy of the main branch on the remote. You can’t
move your local origin/main branch directly; Git does it for you as a matter of course when you interact
with the remote (e.g. when you pull).
We’re going to call the main branch on our local machines the local branch, and we’ll call the one on
origin the upstream branch.

10.2 Pushing to a Remote

Fun Fact: when you push or pull, you technically specify the remote and the branch you want to use. This
is me saying, “Push the branch I’m on right now (presumably main) and merge it into main on origin.

48
Chapter 10. Remote Tracking Branches 49

$ git push origin main

“But wait! I haven’t been doing that!”

It turns out there’s an option you can set to make it happen automatically. Let’s say you’re on the main
branch and then run this:

$ git push --set-upstream origin main

$ git push -u origin main # same thing, shorthand

This will do a couple things: 1) it’ll push changes on your local main to the remote server, and 2) it’ll
remember that the remote branch origin/main is tracking your local main branch.
And then, from then on, from the main branch, you can just:

$ git push

and it’ll automatically push to origin/main thanks to your earlier usage of --set-upstream.
And git pull has the same option, as well, though you only need to do it once with either push or pull.
“But wait! I’ve never used --set-upstream, either!”
That’s because by default when you clone a repo, Git automagically sets up a local branch to track the
main branch on the remote.

Bonus Info: Depending on how you made your repo, you might also have a reference to
origin/HEAD. It might be weird to think that there’s a HEAD ref on a remote server that you
can see, but in this case it’s just referring to the branch that you’ll be checking out by default when
you clone the repo.
“OK, so what you’re telling me is that I can just git push and git pull like always and just ignore
everything you wrote in this section?”
Well… yes. Ish. No. We’re going to make use of this to push other branches to the remote!

10.3 Making a Branch and Pushing to Remote

I’m going to make a new local branch topic99:

$ git switch -c topic99

Switched to a new branch 'topic99'

And make some changes:

$ vim README.md # Create and edit a README

$ git add README.md
$ git commit -m "Some important additions"

In our log, we can see where all the branches are:

commit 79ddba75b144bad89e1cbd862e5f3b3409f6c498 (HEAD -> topic99)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Fri Feb 16 16:44:50 2024 -0800

Some important additions

commit 3be2ad2c31b627b431af8c8e592c01f4b989d621 (origin/main, main)

Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Chapter 10. Remote Tracking Branches 50

Date: Fri Feb 16 16:14:13 2024 -0800

Initial checkin

HEAD refers to topic99, and that’s one commit ahead of main (local) and main (upstream on the origin
remote), as far as we know. And we know this because it’s one commit ahead of our remote-tracking
branch origin/main.
Now let’s push!

$ git push
fatal: The current branch topic99 has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use

git push --set-upstream origin topic99

To have this happen automatically for branches without a tracking

upstream, see 'push.autoSetupRemote' in 'git help config'.

Ouch. The short of all this is that we said “push”, and Git said, “To what? You haven’t associated this
branch with anything on the remote!”
And we haven’t. There’s no origin/topic99 remote-tracking branch, and certainly no topic99 branch
on that remote. Yet.
The fix is easy enough—Git already told us what to do.

$ git push --set-upstream origin topic99

And that will do it.

At this point, assuming you’ve pushed to GitHub, you could go to your GitHub page for the project, and
near the top left you should see something that looks like Figure 10.1.

Figure 10.1: Two branches on GitHub

If you pull down that main button, you’ll see topic99 there as well. You can select either branch and
view it in the GitHub interface.
Chapter 11

File States

We’ve talked about this quite a bit in passing already.

If you create a new file, you have to git add it to the stage before you commit.
If you modify a file, you have to git add it to the stage before you commit.
If you add a file foo.txt to the stage, you can remove it from the stage before you commit with
git restore --staged foo.txt.

So clearly files can exist in a variety of “states” and we can move them around between those states.
To figure out what state a file is in and get a hint on how to “undo” it from that state, git status is your
best friend (except in the case of renaming, but more on that mess soon).

11.1 What States Can Files in Git Be In?

There are four of them: Untracked, Unmodified, Modified, and Staged.
• Untracked: Git does not know anything about this file (e.g. you just created it in the repo). Git will
ignore it, but you’ll see it in the status.
You can make Git aware of this file by moving it to Staged State with git add.
Or you can simply remove the file if you don’t want it to exist, or you can add it to your .gitignore
if you want to leave it in place but still have Git ignore it.
• Unmodified: Git knows about this file and it’s in the repo. But you haven’t made any changes to it
since it was last committed.
You can move this file to Modified State by making changes to the file (and saving).
You can remove this file with git rm, which changes the removed file to the Staged State. (Wait—
removing the file puts it on the stage? Yes! More on that later.)
• Modified: Git knows about this file and knows that you’ve changed it. It’s ready for you to stage
those changes or to undo them.
You can change the file to Staged State with git add.
You can change the file to Unmodified State (throwing away your changes) with git restore.
• Staged: The file is ready to be included in the next commit.
You can change to Unmodified State by making a commit with git commit.
You can remove the file from the stage and back to Modified State with git restore --staged.
A file typically goes through this process to be added to a repo:
1. The user creates a new file and saves it. This file is Untracked.

51
Chapter 11. File States 52

2. The user adds the file with git add. The file is now Staged.
3. The user commits the file with git commit. The file is now Unmodified and is part of the repo
and ready to go.
After it’s in the repo, the typical file life cycle only differs by the first step:
1. The user changes the file and saves it. The file is now Modified.
2. The user adds the file with git add. The file is now Staged.
3. The user commits the file with git commit. The file is now Unmodified and is part of the repo
and ready to go.
Keep in mind that often a commit is a bundle of different changes to different files. All those files would
be added to the stage before the single commit.
Here’s a partial list of ways to change state:
• Untracked → git add foo.txt → Staged (as “new file”)
• Modified → git add foo.txt → Staged
• Modified → git restore foo.txt → Unmodified
• Unmodified → edit foo.txt → Modified (with your favorite editor)
• Staged → git commit → Unmodified
• Staged → git restore --staged → Modified
Again, git status will often give you advice of how to undo a state change.

11.2 Unmodified to Untracked

A variation of git rm tells Git to remove the file from the repo but leave it intact in the working tree.
Maybe you want to keep the file around but don’t want Git to track it any longer.
To make this happen, you use the --cached switch.
Here’s an example where we remove the file foo.txt from the repo but keep it around in our working
tree:

$ ls
foo.txt

$ git rm --cached foo.txt

rm 'foo.txt'

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
deleted: foo.txt

Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
foo.txt

$ ls
foo.txt

There you see in the status output that Git has staged the file for deletion, but it’s also mentioning that
the file exists and is untracked. And a subsequent ls shows that the file still exists.
At this point, you can commit and the file would then be in Untracked state.
Chapter 11. File States 53

11.3 Files In Multiple States

A file can actually sort of exist in multiple states at once. For instance, you might have one version of a
file on the stage, and another version of that file, with different modifications, in your working tree at the
same time. Technically these are actually different files since they don’t contain the same data.
Just remember that when you stage a file, it effectively stages a copy of that file as it exists right then. There
is nothing stopping you from making another modification to the file in the working tree and ending up
like this:

% git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: foo.txt

Changes not staged for commit:

(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
modified: foo.txt

You can overwrite the version on the stage by adding it again. And various incantations of restore can
change the files in different ways. Look up the --staged and --worktree options for git restore.
I’ll leave how to move files around in these simultaneous states as an exercise to the reader, but I wanted
you to at least be aware of it.
Chapter 12

Comparing Files with Diff

The powerful git diff command can give you differences between two files or commits. We mentioned
it briefly at the beginning, but here we’re going to delve more deeply into all the things you can do with
it.
It’s not the easiest thing to read at first, but you do get used to it after a while. My most common use case
is to quickly scan to remember what I’ve changed in the working tree so I know what to add to the stage
and what commit message to use.

12.1 Basic Usage

The most basic use case is that you’ve modified some files in your working tree and you want to see what
the differences are between what was there and what you added.
For example, let’s say I’ve modified my hello.py file (but haven’t staged it yet). I can check out what
I’ve changed like so:

$ git diff
diff --git a/hello.py b/hello.py
index 4a8f53f..8ee1fe4 100644
--- a/hello.py
+++ b/hello.py
@@ -1,4 +1,8 @@
def hello():
- print("Hello, world!")
+ print("HELLO, WORLD!")
+
+def goodbye():
+ print("See ya!")

hello()
+goodbye()

What do we have there? Why, it’s an impenetrable mess, of course!

The End
All right, take a deep breath and let’s figure it out.
Since the output is plastered over with hello.py, we can safely assume this is the file we’re talking about.
If the diff is reporting on multiple files (e.g. you’re comparing two commits), each file will have its own
section in the output.

54
Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 55

The index line has the blob hashes and file permissions. A blob hash is the hash of the specific
file in the states being compared. This isn’t something you need to worry about, typically. Or
maybe not even ever.
After that we have a couple lines indicating the that old version of the file a/hello.py is the one marked
with minus signs, and the new version (that you haven’t staged yet) is b/hello.py and is marked with
plus signs.
Then we have @@ -1,4 +1,8 @@. This means that lines 1-4 in the old version are shown, and lines 1-8 in
the new version are shown. (So clearly we’ve at least added some lines here.)
Finally, we get to the steak and potatoes of the whole thing—what has actually changed? Remembering
that the old version is minus and the new version is plus, let’s look at just that part of the diff again:

def hello():
- print("Hello, world!")
+ print("HELLO, WORLD!")
+
+def goodbye():
+ print("See ya!")

hello()
+goodbye()

Rules:
• If a line is prefixed with -, it means this is how the line was in the old version.
• If a line is prefixed with +, it means this is how the line is in the new, modified version.
• If a line is not prefixed with anything, it means it is unchanged between the versions.
The diff won’t show you all the lines of the file! It only shows you what’s changed and some of
the surrounding lines. If there are changes in different parts of the file, the unchanged parts of the
file will be skipped over in the diff.
Another way to read the diff is that lines with a - have been removed and lines with a + have been added.

12.2 Diffing the Stage

What if you’ve added some stuff to the stage and you want to diff it against the previous commit?
Just typing git diff shows nothing!
Why?
The answer is really easy: git diff --staged1 . Done.
But I want to use this subsection to dig a little deeper into what’s happening so you can improve your
understanding of how this works.
A good mental model here is to imagine that the stage must have one of two things on it at all time, either
of these:
1. A copy of a file from the last commit. If this is the case, git status will not show the file on the
stage.
2. A copy of a file from the working tree, something modified from the last commit. In this case
git status will show something on the stage.

So in this mental model, something is always on the stage. It’s just that you don’t see it unless it’s some-
thing different than the last commit that you put there with git add.
OK? I know I’m asking you to just bear with me on faith, so thank you for that.
1
The --staged flag is more modern. Older versions of Git used git diff --cached.
Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 56

Back to the question: if you have added some modified files to the stage, why does git diff show nothing
is changed?
It’s because git diff always compares the working tree to the stage. (Unless you’re diffing specific
commits—see below.) And in this case, after you’ve added your modified file to the stage, it’s the same
as the working tree. So no diffs.
Contrast this to where you’ve modified the working tree but haven’t added the file to the stage. In this case,
the file on the stage is just like the last commit, which is different than your working tree. So git diff
shows the differences.
Got it?
Well, okay, then… what if you want to diff what’s on the stage with the last commit? That is, instead of
diffing the working tree with the stage, you want to diff the stage with the HEAD?
Back to the punchline:

$ git diff --staged

And that’ll do it.

12.3 More Diff Fun

Let’s speed through some examples of things you can do with diff.

12.3.1 Diff Any Commits or Branches

You have more at your disposal than just diffing the working tree or stage. You can actually diff any two
commits. This will show you all the differences between them.
For example, if you know the commit hashes, you can diff them directly:

$ git diff d977 27a3

Or if you have two branch names:

$ git diff main topic

Or mix and match:

$ git diff main 27a3

Or use HEAD:

$ git diff HEAD 27a3

Or relative HEAD:

$ git diff HEAD~3 HEAD~4

That last one diffs three commits before HEAD with four commits before HEAD.

12.3.2 Diffing with Parent Commit

We just showed this example:

$ git diff HEAD~3 HEAD~4

Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 57

But since HEAD~4 is the parent of HEAD~3, is there some shorthand we can use here? Yes!

$ git diff HEAD~3 HEAD~4

$ git diff HEAD~3^! # Same thing!

You can use it anywhere you want to compare a commit with its parent, which is really showing just what
changes were in that one particular commit.

$ git diff HEAD^!

$ git diff HEAD~3^!
$ git diff main^!
$ git diff 27a3^!

12.3.3 More Context

By default, git diff shows 3 lines on context around the changes. If you want to see more, like 5 lines,
use the -U switch.

$ git diff -U5

12.3.4 Just the File Names

If you just want a list of files that have changed, you can use the --name-only option.

$ git diff --name-only

12.3.5 Ignoring Whitespace

There might be a time when you get some tabs/spaces confusion in your source code, which is always
painful. Protip: stick to one and force everyone else on the team to do the same under penalty of paying
for lunch.
But you can commit git diff to ignore whitespace in the comparison:

$ git diff -w
$ git diff --ignore-all-space # Same thing

12.3.6 Just Certain Files

You can just diff certain files.
One way is to just put the file names after a --:

$ git diff -- hello.py

$ git diff -- hello.py another_file.py

You can also specify commits or branches before the --:

$ git diff somebranch -- hello.py

That’ll compare hello.py at HEAD with the version on somebranch.

Or you could give two commits or branches to compare the file there:

$ git diff main somebranch -- hello.py

Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 58

Finally, you can restrict to a file extension using a glob and single quotes:

$ git diff '*.py'

That will just diff the Python files.

12.3.7 Inter-branch Diffs

This is an interesting version of comparing two branches.
We already showed the following example for comparing the commits at two branches:

$ git diff branch1 branch2

But sometimes you want to know what changed in a branch since the branches diverged.
That is, you don’t want to know what’s different now between branch1 and branch2, which is what the
above would give you.
You want to know what branch2 added or deleted that branch1 did not.
In order to see this, you can use this notation:

$ git diff branch1...branch2

This means “diff the common ancestor of branch1 and branch2 with branch2.”
In other words, tell me all the changes that were made in branch2 that branch1 is unaware of. Don’t
show me anything that branch1 has changed since they diverged.

12.4 Difftool
Admittedly, that diff output is hard to read. I swear, though, you do get used to it. I use it all the time.
That said, it can be nicer to see something more visual, you know, like the old version on the left and the
new version on the right in a way that’s visually easier to comprehend.
If you’re using VS Code, you get some nice diffing for free and don’t necessarily need to pay
attention to this section. See more in the VS Code chapter.
First, the bad news is that Git doesn’t support this out of the box.
The good news is that there are a lot of third-party tools that do, and you can easily hook them up so that
they work with Git super easily.
How easy?
Once you set it up, you’ll be able to just write difftool instead of diff on the command line. For
example:

$ git difftool HEAD~3^!

And what does that get you? For me, where I use Vim and have Vimdiff set up as my difftool, it gives me
a screen like in Figure 12.1.
This might be a little tough to see in black and white, but what we have is the old version on the left and
the new version on the right. The lines of minus signs on the left indicate lines that don’t exist in the old
version, and we can see highlighted lines on the right that exist in the new version.
But if you try that, it won’t work. You have to configure it first.
Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 59

Figure 12.1: Vimdiff as the difftool.

12.4.1 Configuring
Firstly, git normally prompts you before launching a third-party difftool. This is annoying, so let’s turn it
off globally:

$ git config --global difftool.prompt false

Secondly, we need to tell it which tool to use.

$ git config --global diff.tool vimdiff

And that might be enough. If vimdiff (or whichever diff tool you’re using) is in your PATH2 , you should
be in business and you’re good to go.
If it’s not in your PATH, maybe because you installed it locally in your home directory tree somewhere,
you can either add it to your PATH (search the Net for how to do this), or you can specify the full path to
your particular difftool. Here’s an example with vimdiff, which is redundant for me because /usr/bin
is already in my PATH.

$ git config --global difftool.vimdiff.path /usr/bin/vimdiff

If you’re using a different difftool other than vimdiff, replace that part of the config line with the name
of the command.
Again, you only have to set the path if the tool isn’t installed in a standard place.

12.4.2 Available Difftools

There are a number of diff tools out there you can choose from. Here’s a partial list, with the caveat that
I’ve only ever used Vimdiff.
• Vimdiff (comes with Vim3 )
• Kompare4
• WinMerge5
2
Setting the PATH is outside the scope of this tutorial, but the short of it is if you can run the diff tool command on the command
line (e.g. by running vimdiff), then it is in the PATH. If it says command not found or some such, then it is not in the PATH.
Search the Intertubes for how to add something to the PATH in Bash. Or set the Git path config explicitly, as shown in the following
paragraph.
3
https://www.vim.org/
4
https://apps.kde.org/kompare/
5
https://winmerge.org/?lang=en
Chapter 12. Comparing Files with Diff 60

• Meld6
• Kdiff37
• Beyond Compare8
• DiffMerge9
• P4Merge10
• Araxis Merge11
Some of these are free, some are paid, and some are free trial.
And remember, VS Code has this functionality without using difftool.

6
https://meldmerge.org/
7
https://kdiff3.sourceforge.net/
8
https://www.scootersoftware.com/
9
https://sourcegear.com/diffmerge/
10
https://www.perforce.com/products/helix-core-apps/merge-diff-tool-p4merge
11
https://www.araxis.com/merge/index.en
Chapter 13

Renaming and Removing Files

This is an extension of dealing with file states, so make sure you read that chapter first!

13.1 Renaming Files

You can use the OS rename command to rename files, but if they’re in a Git repo, it’s better to git mv
them so that Git has total awareness.
Git is confusingly unhelpful with this.
Let’s rename foo.txt to bar.txt and get a status:

$ git mv foo.txt bar.txt

On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
renamed: foo.txt -> bar.txt

So it knows the file is renamed, and the file has been moved to the stage. Like so:
• Unmodified → git mv foo.txt bar.txt → Staged (as “renamed”)
And if we look, we see the file has actually been renamed in the directory to bar.txt, as well.
If we make a commit at this point, the file will be renamed in the repo. Done.
But what if we want to undo the rename?
Git suggests git restore --staged to the rescue… But which file name to use, the old one or new one?
And then what? It turns out that while you can use git restore to undo this by following it with multiple
other commands, you should, in this case, ignore Git’s advice.
Just remember this part: the easiest way to undo a Staged rename is to just do the reverse rename.
Let’s say we renamed and got here:

$ git mv foo.txt bar.txt # Rename foo.txt to bar.txt

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
renamed: foo.txt -> bar.txt

This easiest way to revert this change is to do this:

61
Chapter 13. Renaming and Removing Files 62

$ git mv bar.txt foo.txt # Rename it back to foo.txt

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

And there you go.

In summary, the way to rename a file is:
• Unmodified → git mv foo.txt bar.txt → Staged
• Staged → git commit → Unmodified
And the way to back out of a Staged rename is to rename them back the way they were:
• Staged → git mv bar.txt foo.txt → Unmodified

13.2 Removing Files

You can use the OS remove command to remove files, but if they’re in a git repo, it’s better to git rm
them so that Git has total awareness.
And what happens might seem a little strange.
Let’s say we have a file foo.txt that has already been committed. But we decide to remove it.

$ git rm foo.txt
rm 'foo.txt' # This is Git's output

This actually removes the file—if you look in the directory, it’s gone.
But let’s check the status:

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
deleted: foo.txt

So the now-deleted file is in Staged State, as it were.

If we do a commit here, the file is deleted. Done.
But what if we want to undo the staging of the now-deleted file? There’s a hint for how to get it back with
git restore --staged, as per usual.

Let’s try it:

$ git restore --staged foo.txt

$ git status
On branch main
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add/rm <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
deleted: foo.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Hmmm. “Changes not staged for commit” are files in Modified State. This means that foo.txt has been
“modified”, which is, in this context, a friendlier way of saying “deleted”.
Chapter 13. Renaming and Removing Files 63

So we’ve backed up from Staged State to Modified State. But looking around, the file is still gone! I want
my file back!
We want to move it back to Unmodified State, which Git once again hints how to do in the status:
git restore. Let’s try:

$ git restore foo.txt

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

Git’s telling us there are no Modified files here. Let’s look and see:

$ ls foo.txt
foo.txt

There it is, back safe and sound.

So the process for deleting a committed file is a variant of what we’ve already seen:
• Unmodified → git rm foo.txt → Staged
• Staged → git commit → The file is now gone
And you can undo a deleted file (as long as the delete hasn’t yet been committed) in the same way you
can undo any other file states:
• Staged → git restore --staged foo.txt → Modified
• Modified → git restore foo.txt → Unmodified
Later we’ll talk about ways to recover a deleted file from an earlier commit. But one way you already
know: check out the earlier commit where the file exists, copy the file into a new Untracked file, checkout
the branch where the file will be restored to, rename the Untracked file to the name of the restored file,
then add it and commit.
Note: Just because you remove a file and push your changes doesn’t mean the file is permanently
gone. It’s still in the repo, part of whatever commits it was previously seen with.
If you accidentally commit something that should be secret, you should consider that secret com-
promised and change it where it is used. It will be visible to anyone who clones the repo and sees
that commit.
There are ways around this if you haven’t yet pushed, but that’s beyond the scope of this guide.
Chapter 14

Collaboration across Branches

Let’s say you’re on a team of coders and you all have access to the same GitHub repo. (One person on
the team owns the repo, and they’ve added you all as collaborators1 .)
I’m going to use the term collaborator to mean “someone to whom you have granted write access
to your repo”.
How can you all structure your work so that you’re minimizing conflicts?
There are a number of ways to do this.
• Everyone is a collaborator on the repo, and:
• Everyone uses the same branch, probably main, or:
• Everyone uses their own remote tracking branch and periodically merges with the main branch,
or:
• Everyone uses their own remote tracking branch and periodically merges with a development
branch, which itself is periodically merged into main for each official release.
• Or everyone has their own repo (and are not collaborators on the same repo), and:
• Everyone uses pull requests or other synchronization methods to get their repos merged into
the other devs’.
We’ll look at the first few ways in this chapter, but we’ll save pull requests for later.
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to teamwork with Git, and the methods outlined below can be mixed
and matched with local topic branches, or people having multiple remote tracking branches, or whatever.
Often management will have an approach they want to use for collaboration which might be one of the
ones in this section, or maybe it’s a variant, or maybe its something completely different.
In any case, the best strategy for you, the learner, is to just be familiar with the tools (branching, merging,
conflict resolution, pushing, pulling, remote tracking branches) and use them for effect where it makes
the most sense.
And when you’re first starting out, your intuition about “where it makes the most sense” might not be
dead-on, but it probably won’t be lethal and you’ll figure it out in the school of hard knocks.
“Oh great. Another f—ing learning experience.”
—Actual quote from my mother

14.1 Communication and Delegation

Git can’t save you from poor communication. The only way to minimize conflicts in a shared project to
communicate with your team and clearly assign different tasks to people in a non-conflicting way.
1
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.9/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-personal-account-on-
github/managing-access-to-your-personal-repositories/inviting-collaborators-to-a-personal-repository

64
Chapter 14. Collaboration across Branches 65

Two people shouldn’t generally be editing the same part of the same file, or even any part of the same file.
That’s more of a guideline than a rule, but if you follow it, you will never have a merge conflict.
As we’ve seen, it’s not the end of the world if there is a merge conflict, but life sure is easier if they’re just
avoided.
Takeaway: without good communication and a good distribution of work on your team, you’re doomed.
Make a plan where no one is stepping on toes, and stick to it.

14.2 Approach: Everyone Uses One Branch

This is really easy. Everyone has push access to the repo and does all their work on the main branch.
Benefits:
• Super simple to set up.
• Conceptually not much to juggle.
• All work instantly available to all collaborators upon push.
Drawbacks:
• More potential for merge conflicts.
• Unless you’re rebasing (more on that later), you’ll have a lot of merge commits.
• You can’t push non-working code since it will break everything for everyone else.
Initial setup:
• One person makes the GitHub repo
• The owner of the GitHub repo adds all the team members as collaborators.
• Everyone clones the repo.
Workflow:
• Work is delegated to all collaborators. The work should be as non-overlapping as possible.
• Everyone periodically pulls main and resolves any merge conflicts.
• Everyone pushes their work to main.
In real life, this approach is probably only used on very small teams, e.g. three people at most, with
frequent and easy communication between all members. If you’re working on a small team in school, it
could very well be enough, but I’d still recommend trying a different approach just for the experience.
The other approaches are not that much more complex, and give you a lot more flexibility.

14.3 Approach: Everyone Uses Their Own Branch

In this scenario, we treat main as the working code, and we treat contributors’ branches as where work is
done. When a contributor gets their code working, they merge it back into main.
Benefits:
• You get to work on your own branch without worrying about messing up other people’s work.
• You can commit non-working code since no one else can see it. (You might be wrapping up the
work day and want to push some incomplete code for a backup, for example.)
• Less merge conflict potential since fewer merges are happening than if everyone were committing
to main.
Drawbacks:
• If your branch diverges too far from main, merging might become painful.
• Unless you’re rebasing, the incremental work on your branch might “pollute” the commit history
on main with a lot of tiny commits.
Initial setup:
• One person makes the GitHub repo
• The owner of the GitHub repo adds all the team members as collaborators.
Chapter 14. Collaboration across Branches 66

• Everyone clones the repo.

• Everyone makes their own branch, possibly naming it after themselves.
• Everyone pushes their branch to GitHub, making them remote-tracking branches. (We do this so
that your work is effectively backed up on GitHub when you push it.)
Workflow:
• Work is delegated to all collaborators. The work should be as non-overlapping as possible.
• As collaborators finish their tasks, they will:
• Test everything on their branch.
• Merge the latest main into their branch; do a pull to make sure you have it. (The collaborator
might already have the latest main if no one else has merged into it, which will cause Git to
say there’s nothing to do. This is fine.)
• Test everything, and fix it if necessary.
• Merge their functioning branch into main.
• Push.
• If someone else has modified main while you were testing, Git will complain that you
have to pull before you can push. If there’s a conflict at this point, you’ll have to resolve,
test, and push it. And you’ll have to merge main back into your branch so that your
branch is up-to-date.
The result will look something like Figure 14.1 to start, where all the collaborators have made their own
branches off of main.

Figure 14.1: Collaborators branching off main.

Let’s say Chris (on branch chris) finishes up their work and wants other contributors to be able to see it.
It’s time to merge into main, as we graphically see in Figure 14.2.

Figure 14.2: Chris merges back into main.

After that, other contributors looking at main will see the changes.

14.4 Approach: Everyone Merges to the Dev Branch

In this scenario, we treat main as the published code that we’re going to distribute, often tagged with
a release version number, and we treat a dev branch as the working, unreleased code. And, as in the
previous scenario, everyone has their own branches they’re developing on.
The idea is basically we’re going to have two versions of the working code:
Chapter 14. Collaboration across Branches 67

1. The public, released version that’s on main.

2. The private, internal version that’s on dev.
And then, of course, we’ll have one branch per collaborator.
Another way of thinking about it is that we’re going to have our internal build on dev that is good for
testing and then, when it’s all ready, we’ll “bless” it and merge it into main.
So there will be a lot of merges into dev from all the developer branches, and then every so often there
will be a merge from dev into main.
The developers will never directly merge into main! Usually that is performed by someone in a managerial
role.

Figure 14.3: Working on the dev branch.

Overall the process works as in Figure 14.3. This is a busy image, but notice how Bob and Alice are only
merging their work into the dev branch, and then every so often, their manager merges the dev branch
into main and tags that commit with a release number. (More on tagging later.)
Benefits:
• All the benefits of everyone having their own branch.
• You have an internal branch from which you can make complete builds for internal or external
testing.
Drawbacks:
• A little more complexity and management.
• If your branch diverges too far from dev, merging might become painful.
• Unless you’re rebasing, the incremental work on your branch might “pollute” the commit history
on dev with a lot of tiny commits.
Initial setup:
• One person makes the GitHub repo
• The owner of the GitHub repo adds all the team members as collaborators.
• Everyone clones the repo.
• Everyone makes their own branch, possibly naming it after themselves.
• Everyone pushes their branch to GitHub, making them remote-tracking branches. (We do this so
that your work is effectively backed up on GitHub when you push it.)
Workflow:
• Work is delegated to all collaborators. The work should be as non-overlapping as possible.
• As collaborators finish their tasks, they will:
• Test everything on their branch.
• Merge the latest dev into their branch; do a pull to make sure you have it. (The collaborator
might already have the latest dev if no one else has merged into it, which will cause Git to say
there’s nothing to do. This is fine.)
• Test everything, and fix it if necessary.
• Merge their functioning branch into dev.
• Push.
Chapter 14. Collaboration across Branches 68

• If someone else has modified dev while you were testing, Git will complain that you have
to pull before you can push. If there’s a conflict at this point, you’ll have to resolve, test,
and push it. And you’ll have to merge dev back into your branch so that your branch is
up-to-date.
Managerial Workflow:
• Coordinate with all devs to get a candidate release in dev tested out and ready.
• Merge that candidate release (some commit) from dev into main.
• Tag the main commit with some version number, optionally.
Chapter 15

Rebasing: Moving Commits

I’m going to start with the Number One Rule of Rebasing: never rebase anything that you have pushed.
That is, only rebase local changes that no one else has seen. You can push them after the rebase.
This is more of a guideline than a rule in that you can rebase things you’ve pushed if you understand the
consequences. It’s typically not a great situation, though, so you’ll want to generally avoid it.
The reason is that rebasing rewrites history. And that makes your history get out of sync with the history
of other devs who have cloned the repo with the old history, and it makes syncing up quite challenging.

15.1 Contrasted to Merging

But before we go run off in high spirits talking about rebasing, let’s do a quick merge refresher. Here’s
a variation of an earlier example where we have two divergent branches, Figure 15.1. Let’s say you’re
working on the topic branch.

Figure 15.1: Two divergent branches.

Then you hear that someone has made a change to main and you want to roll those changes into your
topic branch, but not necessarily get your changes in main yet.

At this point, if we wanted to get the changes in main into topic, our merge option was to make another
commit, the merge commit. The merge commit contains the changes from two parent commits (in this
case the commit labeled 2 and the one labeled 4 are the parents) and makes them into a new commit,
marked 5 in Figure 15.2.
If we look at our log at that point, we can see the changes from all the other commits in the graph from
the topic branch.
And we’re good at this point. That worked, and it did what we wanted. Merging is a completely acceptable
solution to this problem.
But there are a couple drawbacks to doing the merge. See, we really just wanted to get the latest stuff from
main into our branch so we could use it, but we didn’t really want to commit anything. But here we’ve
made a new commit for everyone to see.

69
Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 70

Figure 15.2: Two divergent branches, merged.

Not only that, but now the commit graph forms a loop, so the history is a little more convoluted than
perhaps we’d like it.
What really would have been nice is if I could just taken commits 3 and 4 from topic and just somehow
applied those changes to 2 on main. That is, could we pretend that instead of branching off 1 like topic
did, that we instead branched off 2?
After all, if we branched off 2, then we’d have those changes from main that we wanted.
What we need is a way to somehow rewind our commits back to the branch point at 1, and then reapply
them on commit 2. That is, the base of our topic branch, which was commit 1, needs to be changed to
another base at commit 2. We want to rebase it to commit 2!

15.2 How it Works

So let’s do exactly that. Let’s take the changes we made in commit 3 and apply them to main at commit 2.
This will make a brand new commit that includes changes from both commit 2 and commit 3. (Importantly,
this commit didn’t exist before; there was no commit that contained changes from 2 and 3.) We’ll call this
new commit 3’ (“three prime”), since it has the changes that we made in 3.
After that, we’ll do the same thing with commit 4. We’ll apply the changes from old commit 4 to 3’,
making a new commit 4’.
And if we do that, we end up with Figure 15.3.

Figure 15.3: topic branch rebased on main.

And there you see 3’ and 4’ now rebased onto main!

Again, these two commits have the same changes that you originally had in commits 3 and 4, but now
they’ve been applied to main at commit 2. So the code is necessarily different since it now contains
the changes from main. This means your old commits 3 and 4 are effectively gone, and the rebase has
replaced them with two new commits that contain the same changes, just on a different base point.
We just changed history. When we mentioned rewriting history at the top of this chapter, this
is what we were talking about. Imagine some other dev had your old commits 3 and 4 and was
working off those making their own new commits. And then you rebased effectively destroying
commits 3 and 4. Now your commit history is different than the other dev’s and all kinds of Fun™
will be had trying to sort if out.
If you only rebase commits that you haven’t pushed, you’ll never get into trouble. But if some
other dev has a copy of your commits (because you’ve already pushed them and they pulled them),
don’t rebase those commits!
Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 71

15.3 When Should I Do This?

There’s no fixed rule about this. Sometimes a shop will have one, saying that everyone should rebase all
the time so that the commit history has a cleaner look (no merge commits, no loops).
Other shops will say to merge all the time so that the complete history is preserved.

15.4 Pulling and Rebasing

If you might recall from way back when, doing a pull is actually a couple operations: fetch and merge.
The fetch downloads all the new data from the remote, but doesn’t actually merge anything into your
branches or working tree. So you won’t see any local changes after a fetch.
But the pull follows it up with a standard merge so that you see the remote tracking branch’s changes in
your local branch.
So, assuming you have everything set up and you’re on your main branch, when you do this:

$ git pull

Git actually does something like this:

git fetch # Get all the information from origin

git merge origin/main # Merge origin/main into main

(Recall that origin/main is your remote-tracking branch—it’s the version of main that’s on origin, not
the main on your local machine.)
But merging isn’t the only thing you can do there. Given that this is the chapter on rebasing, you might
correctly suspect that we can make it do a rebase, instead.
And here’s how:

$ git pull --rebase

That causes these two things to happen:

git fetch # Get all the information from origin

git rebase origin/main # Rebase main into origin/main

If you want that to be the default behavior for the current repo, you can run this one-time command:

$ git config pull.rebase true

If you want it to be the default behavior for all repos, you can:

$ git config --global pull.rebase true

If you’ve configured your repo to always rebase on a pull, you can override that to force a merge (if you
want) with:

$ git pull --no-rebase # Do a merge instead of a rebase

15.5 Conflicts
When you do a merge, there’s a chance that you might conflict with some of the changes in the other
branch, and you have to resolve those, as we’ve seen.
Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 72

Can the same thing happen with a rebase?

Of course! If the commit you’re trying to rebase onto conflicts with your commit, you’ll have the same
trouble you’d have with a merge.
Luckily, Git will let you resolve the conflict in a way similar to the merge.
Let’s start with a simple example. I’m going to have a text file that contains the following:

The magic number is 1.

We’ll have that in a commit on the main branch.

Then we’ll make a new topic branch there.
Then on the main branch we’ll change the number to 2 and commit.
And on the topic branch we’ll change the number to 3 and commit.
So we’ll have the scenario in Figure 15.4.

Figure 15.4: Branches ready for conflict.

Finally, we’ll try to rebase topic onto main.

At that point, Git will become confused. It knows the last commit on main has 2 and that topic is unaware
of this (because it branched off before that change). And it knows the last commit on topic has 3. So
which one is right?
Let’s try to rebase while we’re on the topic branch and see what happens.

$ git rebase main

Auto-merging magic.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in magic.txt
error: could not apply 9f19221... Update to 3
hint: Resolve all conflicts manually, mark them as resolved with
hint: "git add/rm <conflicted_files>", then run "git rebase
hint: --continue".
hint: You can instead skip this commit: run "git rebase --skip".
hint: To abort and get back to the state before "git rebase", run
hint: "git rebase --abort".
hint: Disable this message with "git config advice.mergeConflict
hint: false"
Could not apply 9f19221... Update to 3

Whoa, Nelly. OK, so it can’t do that. It says we need to “Resolve all conflicts manually”, and then add
them, and then we’ll run rebase again with the --continue flag to continue the rebase.

If you keep reading the hints, you’ll see there some more stuff in there. We’ll get to --skip later,
but do note that if the conflict is more than you want to take on right now, you can just run:

$ git rebase --abort

 Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 73

to pretend you never started it in the first place.

This might sound a little familiar. It’s basically the same process as we went through with the merge
conflict.
1. Edit the conflicting file and make it Right.
2. Add it.
3. Continue the rebase.
Let’s do that. If I pop open that file magic.txt in my editor, I see:

1 <<<<<<< HEAD
2 The magic number is 2
3 =======
4 The magic number is 3
5 >>>>>>> 9f19221 (Update to 3)

That’s just like in a merge conflict—Git is showing us the two choices we have for this line. So we’ll
consult with the team and come to an agreement on what should be in the file, and we delete everything
that shouldn’t be there and we make it Right.

The magic number is 3

And I save that.

Now, what were we supposed to do at this point, again? If you’ve forgotten, it’s fine. Just run git status
to see where we’re at.

$ git status
interactive rebase in progress; onto 6ceeefb
Last command done (1 command done):
pick 9f19221 Update to 3
No commands remaining.
You are currently rebasing branch 'topic' on '6ceeefb'.
(fix conflicts and then run "git rebase --continue")
(use "git rebase --skip" to skip this patch)
(use "git rebase --abort" to check out the original branch)

Unmerged paths:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
both modified: magic.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Oh yeah! --continue, right?

$ git rebase --continue

magic.txt: needs merge
You must edit all merge conflicts and then
mark them as resolved using git add

What? Oh, we should have read more of the status message. It says to use git add to mark resolution of
the file magic.txt. Let’s do that.

$ git add magic.txt

$ git status
interactive rebase in progress; onto 6ceeefb
Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 74

Last command done (1 command done):

pick 9f19221 Update to 3
No commands remaining.
You are currently rebasing branch 'topic' on '6ceeefb'.
(all conflicts fixed: run "git rebase --continue")

Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: magic.txt

That status looks nicer. Now --continue.

$ git rebase --continue

This pops me into my editor to edit the commit message. This is your opportunity to change the commit
message if it no longer reflects the commit. (That is, if you changed the commit when you resolving the
conflict to be something entirely different, you might need to edit the message.) Edit it if necessary and
save it.
And Git says:

[detached HEAD 443fa53] Update to 3

1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/topic.

And git status shows we’re all clear.

After all that, we see our new commit graph in Figure 15.5.

Figure 15.5: After rebase conflict resolution.

15.6 Squashing Commits

This concept fits in with the notion of a clean commit history.
Let’s say you were tasked with implementing a feature, namely adding an alert box saying that the storage
limit was exceeded.
No problem. You add it and commit with message “Added feature #121”. (And you don’t push yet.)

alert("Strrage limit exceeeded");

Then after the commit, you notice a typo. Heck.

So you fix it and commit with message “Fixed typo”.

alert("Storage limit exceeeded");

Done.
Wait! There’s another typo! Are you kidding me?
So you fix it:
 Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 75

alert("Storage limit exceeded");

And add another commit saying “Fixed another typo”.

Now your local commit history reads:

Fixed another typo

Fixed a typo
Added feature #121

That’s not super clean, right? Really this was supposed to be one commit that implemented feature #121.
But luckily you haven’t pushed yet, which means you’re still free to rewrite that history!
You can use a feature of rebase called squashing to get this done.
What you want to do is squash those two typo fixes into the previous commit, the one where you first tried
to implement the feature.
First, let’s look at the log.

$ git log
commit c1820e6d0da19013208b389d264310162477b099 (HEAD -> main)
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Fixed another typo

commit c62c0db7b82e6b415d36bd0f00d568fd503164b7
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Fixed typo

commit ab84a428b8baae0078ee0647a67b34a89a6abed8
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Added feature #121

commit a95854659e31d203e2325eee61d892c9cdad767c
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Added

Since this is a rebase, we’re going to rebase onto something, namely the commit prior to the added feature
commit, the commit ID starting with a9585.
And we want to do it interactively, which is a special rebase mode that lets us do the squashing, and we
get there with the -i flag.

$ git rebase -i a9585

This brings us into an editor that has this information, and a huge comment block below it full of instruc-
tions.

1 pick ab84a42 Added feature #121

2 pick c62c0db Fixed typo
 Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 76

3 pick c1820e6 Fixed another typo

Notice that they’re listed in forward order instead of the reverse log order we’re used to.
Look at all those options! Pick, reword, edit, squash, fixup… so many things to choose from. As you
might imagine we’re in a pretty powerful history rewriting mode.
For now, though, let’s just look at “squash” and “fixup”, which are almost the same thing.
Starting with “squash”, what I want to do is take those typo fix commits and work them into the “Added
feature” commit. We can use the squash mode to do this.
I’ll edit the file to look like this:

1 pick ab84a42 Added feature #121

2 squash c62c0db Fixed typo
3 squash c1820e6 Fixed another typo

That will squash “Fixed another typo” into “Fixed typo” and then squash that result into “Added feature
#121”.
And pick just means “use this commit as-is”.

There are shorthand versions for all these commands. I could have used s instead of squash.

After I save the file, I get launched right back into another editor that has this in it:

1 # This is a combination of 3 commits.

2 # This is the 1st commit message:
3

4 Added feature #121

5

6 # This is the commit message #2:

7

8 Fixed typo
9

10 # This is the commit message #3:

11

12 Fixed another typo

We’re making a new rebased commit here with the three commits squashed into one, and so we get to
write a new commit message. Helpfully, Git has included all three commit messages. Let’s hack it down
to just have the commit message we want.

1 Added feature #121

And saving gets us back out with a message.

[detached HEAD 4bc6bca] Added feature #121

Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 foo.js
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main.

Success is good. I like success.

What’s that about detached HEAD? Git detaches the HEAD briefly when doing a rebase. Don’t
worry—it gets reattached for you.
Now my commit history is all cleaned up.
 Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 77

commit 4bc6bca6870d124b3eebc9afd32486a5a23189fc (HEAD -> main)

Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Added feature #121

commit a95854659e31d203e2325eee61d892c9cdad767c
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Wed Jul 17 11:53:10 2024 -0700

Added

And you can see, if you look at the earlier log, that the “Added feature” commit ID has changed. We did
a rebase, after all, so those old commits are gone, replaced by the new ones.
Finally, after all this, now you can push.

15.6.1 Squash versus Fixup

Now a quick note about fixup instead of squash. It’s the same thing, except only the squashed-into
commit message is kept by default. So if I ran this:

1 pick fbc1075 Added feature #121

2 fixup fd4ca42 Fixed typo
3 fixup 6a10e97 Fixed another typo

Git instantly returns with:

Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/main.

And Git log only shows the “Added feature #121” commit. With fixup, Git automatically discards the
squashed commit messages.

15.7 Multiple Conflicts in the Rebase

When you merge with commit and there are multiple conflicts, you resolve them all in one big merge
commit and then you’re done. You use git commit to wrap it all up.
Rebase is a little different. Since rebase “replays” your commits onto the new base one at a time, each
replay is a merge conflict opportunity. This means that as you rebase, you might have to resolve multiple
conflicts one after another.
For example, let’s say on your topic branch you made a commit that modified file foo.txt. And then
you made another commit that modified file bar.txt.
But unbeknownst to you, someone on the main branch has also modified those two files, so they’re bound
to conflict when you rebase.
And so you begin git rebase main, and we’re in trouble right off the bat. It’s telling us that foo.txt
conflicts.
So you fix it up and then run git rebase --continue and edit the commit message, and get on with it.
But that all does is move on to your next commit to bar.txt and try to rebase that. And it conflicts, too!
So you fix it up and then run git rebase --continue and edit the commit message, and get on with it.
Again.
And finally you get the success message:
Chapter 15. Rebasing: Moving Commits 78

[detached HEAD 31c3947] topic change bar

1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
Successfully rebased and updated refs/heads/topic.

This is why you can conclude a merge with a simple commit, but you have to conclude a rebase by
repeatedly running git rebase --continue until all commits have been rebased cleanly.
Is this good or bad? It might be better in that you get a chance to merge each commit in isolation so it
might be easier to reason about and avoid errors. But at the same time it’s more legwork to get through it.
As always, use the right tool for the job!
Chapter 16

Stashing: Temporarily Set Changes

Aside

If you’re in the middle of working on something and you realize you want to pull some changes in, but
you’re not ready to make a commit because your stuff is still completely broken, git stash is your friend.
It takes the stuff you’re working on and stashes it away on the side, returning your working tree to the
state of the last commit.
So your changes will look like they’re gone—but don’t worry, they’re safely stashed away and you can
bring them back later.
Then you can pull the new stuff down so you’re up-to-date, and then unstash your stuff on top of it.
It’s kind of like a mini rebase in spirit.

16.1 Example
Let’s say we’re all caught up to the latest.

$ git pull

Great. And we start hacking. We open an existing file foo.rs and add some code to it as per usual.
Then Chris calls from the next desk over and says, “Hey wait—I just made a critical update to main and
you should use that!”
And you think, “Well, heck, I was in the middle of something.” You’re not ready to commit, but you want
Chris’s changes.
So you save your files and then run this:

$ git stash
Saved working directory and index state WIP on main: c72c245
some very descriptive commit message

And, if you were watching, you might have seen your file in your editor change back to what it used to
be! Your changes have been undone and stashed away!
If you git status at this point, you’ll see:

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

79
Chapter 16. Stashing: Temporarily Set Changes Aside 80

nothing to commit, working tree clean

It’s all clean, which means now you can pull and get the latest main. So you do that.

$ git pull
remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
remote: (from 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 943 bytes | 943.00 KiB/s, done.
From /home/beej/tmp/origin
10a8ad6..e286011 main -> origin/main
Updating 10a8ad6..e286011
Fast-forward
foo.rs | 1 +
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

And now you’re up to date.

Oh, wait. What was it we were working on? Oh yeah! We stashed it! Let’s unstash those changes with
pop:

$ git stash pop

Auto-merging foo.rs
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Changes not staged for commit:

(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
modified: foo.rs

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
Dropped refs/stash@{0} (046ac112f8c02c3dc02984ad71d353a3e5be9a7a)

Auto-merging sounds good. Looks like things went well. And if we look at our file now we’ll see our
changes brought out of the stash and reapplied. Our file foo.rs is in “modified” state and ready for us to
work on, or add and commit.

16.2 The Stash Stack

If you’re familiar with stack abstract data type1 , your ears might have perked up when you read
git stash pop.

Yes, Git tracks stashes in a stack. If you’re not familiar with a stack, read up on it first.
• git stash pushes the working tree on the stash stack.
• git stash pop pops the top of the stash stack and applies it to the working tree.
• git stash list shows you the current stash stack.
• git stash drop deletes a particular stash stack entry.

Because of this, I could stash, then do something else, then stash again, and we’ll have two stashes on
the stack.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_(abstract_data_type)
 Chapter 16. Stashing: Temporarily Set Changes Aside 81

$ git stash list

stash@{0}: WIP on main: 659b132 added repo1 another line
stash@{1}: WIP on main: 659b132 added repo1 another line

The top of the stack is stash@{0}.

If I ran just plain git stash pop, it would take the stash at the top, which is index 0, removing it from
the stack and applying it to the working tree.
But you can also pop by stash name if you want to pop something from the middle of the stack.

$ git stash pop 'stash@{1}'

$ git stash pop --index 1 # same thing

Similarly stash drop will pop the top of the stack and not apply the changes to the working tree, discard-
ing them instead.
And stash drop can also operate on a particular stash by name if you want to drop something from the
middle of the stack.

16.3 Conflicts
Now that you’ve spent so much time reading about conflicts during merge and rebase, you might start to
get a little worried here.
What if I stash then pull, but then popping the stash does something that conflicts with the changes I
pulled? Can that happen?
Of course it can. Hooray.
When it happens, it looks like this:

$ git stash pop

Auto-merging foo.rs
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo.rs
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Unmerged paths:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
both modified: foo.rs

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
The stash entry is kept in case you need it again.

Sure looks like a merge conflict, and it looks doubly so in the editor.

1 fn main() {
2 <<<<<<< Updated upstream
3 println!("This is critically fixed");
4 =======
5 println!("This is sorta working");
6 >>>>>>> Stashed changes
7 }

You can see our stashed changes below where were tried to fix it, but then we see that conflicts with
Chris’s fix from upstream.
Chapter 16. Stashing: Temporarily Set Changes Aside 82

So we do the merge thing and make it Right, editing it to look the way we want, and we save it. Our status
is still not clean, though.

$ git status
On branch main
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.

Unmerged paths:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
both modified: foo.rs

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Let’s add it with git add to mark it resolved.

A couple things can happen at this point.
1. If you just accepted the pulled version (i.e. discarding your conflicting changes), nothing new will
happen. After all, there’s already a commit in your repo with their version, so Git it smart enough
to just call it a day. git status reports clean.
2. If you accepted a version different than the one you pulled (i.e. you kept some or all of your changes),
then git status will report that file as modified and staged to be committed.
If you’re not ready to commit at this point, use git restore --staged to unstage the file. That
will change it to just be modified and you can work on it more before you commit it.
In both conflict cases the stashed changes are still in the stash! Yes, you ran stash pop, but when
there’s a conflict, the stash remains untouched and doesn’t actually pop.
If you’re done with it (and you probably are), you can use git stash drop to discard the particular stash
from the stack and get all cleaned up.

16.4 Stashing New Files

What if you’ve added a new file to your working tree but it’s currently untracked? Can stash see it?
No. You have to add it first. So do a git add (but not a commit!) then stash it. The new file should
disappear from the working tree.
Chapter 17

GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests

What if you want to make changes to a repo on GitHub but you don’t have write permission? Here’s how.
A fork is a clone of someone else’s GitHub repo that you’ve made on GitHub using their “Fork” command.
It’s a regular clone except that GitHub is doing some bookkeeping to track which repo you forked from.
The upstream is by convention the name of the remote that you forked from.
A pull request (or “PR” for short) is a way for you to offer changes you’ve made to your fork to the owner
of the original repo.
Forks and Pull Requests are a GitHub thing, not a Git thing. It’s some additional functionality
that GitHub has implemented on their website that you can use.
Let’s say, for example, you found an open source project you liked and there was a bug in it. You don’t
have permission to write to the project’s GitHub repo, so how can you change it?
The process for someone making a pull request is:
1. On GitHub: fork the repo. Now you have your own clone of it.
2. Clone your repo to your local machine. Now you have two clones of it: your fork on GitHub and
its clone on your local machine.
3. Make the fix on your local machine and test it.
4. Push your fix to your GitHub fork.
5. On GitHub, create a pull request. This informs the upstream owner that you have changes you’d
like them to merge.
6. On GitHub, the upstream owner reviews your PR and decides if they want to merge it. If so, they
merge it. Otherwise they comment and ask for changes, or delete it.
7. At this point, if you’re done, you can optionally delete your fork.
Let’s give it a try! Feel free to issue PRs on my sample repo, used below. I’m just going to delete them
(they won’t be merged); don’t take it personally—I just don’t have time to review them all.

17.1 Making a Fork

Head on over to my test repo1 and let’s do this:
• In the upper right there should be a button labeled “Fork”. Click it.
• Under “Owner”, choose your user name.
• Under “Repository name”, chose the default or make a new name.
• Click the “Create fork” button.
This can be done with impunity. That is, you’ve made your own fork but the original owner is
unaware that you did. You can delete it with no damage to the original repo. Remember that a fork
is a clone on GitHub that you have ownership of independent of the original repo.
1
https://github.com/beejjorgensen/git-example-repo

83
 Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 84

At this point, you should land on the project page for your fork, and the fine print on the page reads:
“forked from beejjorgensen/git-example-repo”.
And now we have our own version of that repo on GitHub to do with as we please.
We can clone it as normal, pull, push, delete the repo, etc. The owner of the original repo will not know
about it—our changes affect our repo alone. Later we’ll see how to issue a pull request to try to get our
changes in the original upstream repo.

17.2 Making Your Changes

Let’s make some changes. First, we have to clone our repo (that is, clone the fork we made) onto our local
machine.
So pull down the “Code” button as usual and select the SSH link to clone (or use the GitHub CLI variant
if you’re using that).

$ git clone git@github.com:user/git-example-repo.git

Cloning into 'git-example-repo'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 4, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (4/4), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
remote: Total 4 (delta 0), reused 4 (delta 0), pack-reused 0
Receiving objects: 100% (4/4), done.

And then you can cd into that directory and see the files there.

$ cd git-example-repo
$ ls
hello.py README.md

Let’s modify hello.py to this:

1 #!/usr/bin/env python
2

3 print("Hello, world!")
4 print("This is my modification")

And let’s add it, make a commit, and push.

$ git add hello.py

$ git commit -m "modified"
[main 5d3fe49] modified
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
$ git push
Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 1.02 KiB | 1.02 MiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
To github.com:user/git-example-repo.git
4332527..5d3fe49 main -> main

Again, this just pushed to our fork, not the upstream. You can look at your fork’s page on GitHub and see
the change there.
Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 85

17.3 Syncing the Upstream with Your Fork

Are you ready to make a PR? Hold up just a moment!
What if the upstream owner has made changes to their repo in the meantime? Don’t you want to make
sure your code works with the latest version of their code?
Of course you do.
On your fork’s page, you might have noticed that it has a “Sync fork” button that you can pull down.
If you pull it down and it says “This branch is not behind the upstream”, then congratulations! You’re
already up to date! Go ahead and make a PR, as outlined in the next section.
If you pull it down and it says “This branch is out-of-date” and offers you an “Update branch” button, then
congratulations! You’re out of date, but you can be brought up to date without a conflict. Click “Update
branch” and then go ahead and make a PR, as outlined in the next section. (It might also offer you a
“Discard” button, but don’t press that unless you want to discard your changes!)
If it instead says “This branch has conflicts that must be resolved”, bad news. You have some changes in
your repo that conflict with someone else’s changes in the upstream. You have some options:
• The UI says you can open a pull request, which will give you a chance to resolve the conflict in-
browser as outlined in the next section.
• It also says you can just throw away your changes and replace them with the upstream. Bummer.
• Aside from that, you can actually merge your branch from the upstream on the command line and
take care of the conflict there without opening a PR first. See Syncing on the Command Line, below.
In general, it’s a good idea to keep in sync with the upstream repo. This way you can be sure your changes
aren’t conflicting with any upstream changes as you go. It’s way better than waiting to resolve them all
at the end when you’re ready to issue a pull request.

17.4 Making a Pull Request

Now that we’ve modified our fork to our satisfaction, we can ask the upstream maintainer if they’re willing
to accept it into the official repo.
Maybe they aren’t ready! Don’t take it personally if they don’t answer or answer with ways they
need your patch improved. Work with the owners to get the job done to both of your satisfactions.
Let’s go!
• Click the “Contribute” button and then “Open pull request”.
• Look for the text “This branch has conflicts that must be resolved”. If you find that text, it means the
upstream can’t automatically apply your PR and they’ll have to do manual work to make it happen.
They’re far more likely to just reject it. To avoid this, you have some options:
• Don’t open the PR, go back and sync with the upstream, fix the conflict, and try again.
• Or click the “Resolve conflicts” button right there in the UI and use the in-browser editor to
manually resolve.
• Add a nice title.
• Add a good description. You’re asking someone to incorporate your code into their project, so you’ll
want to describe what the code does here to make their lives easier when they review it. (Since this
example goes to my repo, you can just pretend you wrote something nice—I’m just going to close
the PR.)
• Click “Create pull request”!
This lands us on the PR page. You can add more comments or close the request (if you changed your mind
about it).
The owner of the upstream will see the PR has been issued, and now you have to wait for a response.
Maybe they respond with a comment asking for improvements or other questions. Maybe they reject the
PR and close it, unmerged. Or maybe they accept! Happy days!
Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 86

17.5 Flipside: Merging a Pull Request

As the upstream owner, if someone issues a PR you’ll be notified (unless you’ve turned those notifications
off) with an email and in the notifications in GitHub in the upper right.
When you do, you can visit your project page on GitHub and decide what to do with the PR.
At the top of the project page, you’ll see a “Pull requests” button with a number next to indicating how
many PRs are currently outstanding.
• Click the button to see the list.
• Click on a PR title to get to the PR.
Now we’re looking at the PR. Read the description to see what it does, and then, very importantly review
the code!
You’re about to accept code from someone you probably don’t know. On this planet, most
people are friendly, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t some bad actors (the industry term is a--
holes) out there looking to take advantage of you by introducing some malicious code. Even if
you’ve known the contributor for a year, they might be playing a long game, and if that seems
unlikely to you, read about the XZ utils hack that took place in 2024a .
a
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XZ_Utils_backdoor

To review the code, look right below the description to the contributor’s avatar and the commit message.
Click on the commit message and you’ll see a diff2 . Lines marked with a + are added, and lines marked
with - are removed.
If you just want a straight up view of the file as it was edited by the contributor, you can hit the “…” on
the right and then “View file”.
If it’s almost right but you need to make a modification, you can also hit “Edit file” and add commits
directly to the PR.
If everything looks good, scroll down and hopefully you’ll see some text that reads “This branch has no
conflicts with the base branch” and “Merging can be performed automatically”. This is good news.
If it says that, you can just click “Merge pull request”, and that will add the changes to your repo and close
the PR. It’s nice to also add a comment thanking the contributor—they just gave you work for free, after
all!
Closing a PR doesn’t delete the PR. You can still reopen it.
But let’s say the PR does conflict and can’t be automatically merged. GitHub complains that “This branch
has conflicts that must be resolved” and gives you some options.
As the upstream owner, you can click the “Resolve conflicts” button and fix the issue if possible.
Or you can just reject the PR and ask the person who opened it to resolve the conflict so that your life
might be made easier with an automatic merge.

17.6 Making Many Pull Requests with Branches

Here’s the thing about pull requests: when you make one, it takes all the changes you have on your branch
and bundles them together in one. Doesn’t matter if the changes are doing radically different things; they
all get rolled into the same PR.
This is sometimes not so great from an administrative perspective. Maybe I want a PR for issue #1 and a
different PR for issue #2!
The way to make this happen is to make a local branch on the clone of your fork for each individual PR,
and push those branches to your fork. Then when you create the PR, you choose the branch to use. Even
if your branch is named something like feature1, you can still merge it into the main branch on the
upstream.
2
A diff shows the difference between two files.
Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 87

So make a new branch for the feature:

$ git switch -c feature1

Switched to a new branch 'feature1'

Then make your changes, add, and commit.

$ vim readme.txt
$ git add readme.txt
$ git commit -m "feature 1"
[feature1 1ad9e92] feature 1
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Then push them to your repo, setting up a remote-tracking branch:

$ git push -u origin feature1

Enumerating objects: 5, done.
Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 979 bytes | 979.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (1/1), completed with 1 local
remote: object.
remote:
remote: Create a pull request for 'feature1' on GitHub by
remote: visiting:
remote: https://github.com/user/fork/pull/new/feature1
remote:
To github.com:user/fork.git
* [new branch] feature1 -> feature1
branch 'feature1' set up to track 'origin/feature1'.

Now you can jump back to GitHub and issue a PR.

There might be a handy little popup there saying “feature1 had recent pushes 4 minutes ago” and a button
“Compare and pull request” you can click to make the PR.
But if it’s been too long and the popup is gone, not to worry. See the branch selector button on the upper
left that probably says “main” right now? Pull it down and select the branch “feature1” that you want to
create the PR for. Then click “Contribute” and open the PR.
There’s a line at the top of the PR that indicates the repo and branch that will be merged into, and, on the
right, your repo and branch name that you’ll be merging from.
The rest of the PR proceeds as normal.
Don’t delete your branch until after the merge! Once it has been safely merged, GitHub will pop up
a “Delete branch” button for you on the PR page. This will delete the branch on GitHub, but you’ll still
have to delete feature1 and origin/feature1 on the command line.

17.7 Deleting a Pull Request

Short answer: you can’t.
Long answer: you can.
The irony is that the short answer is longer. I don’t make the rules.
Proper long answer: you can if you are the upstream owner and the PR contains sensitive information.
Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 88

There’s no way in the UI to delete PRs, whether you’re the forker or forkee. And this can be a bummer
especially if you’ve accidentally included some sensitive information like social security number 078-05-
11203 .
But hope is not all lost! The upstream owner can visit the virtual assistant at GitHub and ask for a pull
request removal4 which apparently works. I haven’t tried it.
If there’s a way as the forker to delete the PR they created, I haven’t seen it. You’ll have to plead your
case with the upstream owner and get them to do it.
In any case, you most definitely should change your leaked credentials right now and let that be a lesson
to you.

17.8 Syncing on the Command Line

GitHub has that nice Sync button to bring the upstream changes into your fork, and this was a welcome
addition. It used to be you had to do it the hard way.
But the hard way has an additional benefit: if the upstream conflicts with your changes, you can merge
them locally before creating the PR. The GitHub UI requires you create a PR to resolve the conflict.
Additionally, if you just like the command line and want to quickly sync the upstream to your branch, this
can do it.
The plan is this:
1. Add an upstream remote that points to the upstream repo.
2. Fetch the data from upstream.
3. Merge the upstream branch into your branch.
4. Resolve conflicts.
5. Push your branch.
6. Go issue a now-hopefully-non-conflicting PR.
Let’s try. I’ll be on my main branch, and try to sync it with the upstream’s main branch. I’ll show what
it’s like when there’s a conflict. (If there were no conflict, the merge would succeed automatically.)
First things first: if you haven’t already, set up the upstream remote to point to the original owner’s repo.
This is the repo that you forked from. Since you won’t be pushing to it, you can use the SSH or HTTP
methods to access it. (And this remote can be named anything, but upstream is a common convention.)

$ git remote add upstream https://github.com/other/upstream.git

And then we need to get the new commits from the upstream repo and merge them into our stuff.

$ git fetch upstream

remote: Enumerating objects: 5, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (5/5), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (1/1), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 1), reused 3 (delta 1), pack-reused 0
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), 950 bytes | 950.00 KiB/s, done.
From https://github.com/other/upstream
* [new branch] main -> upstream/main

$ git switch main # Make sure we're on the main branch

$ git merge upstream/main

Auto-merging readme.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in readme.txt

3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Security_number#SSNs_used_in_advertising
4
https://support.github.com/request?q=pull+request+removals
Chapter 17. GitHub: Forking and Pull Requests 89

Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

(You could also rebase if you wanted.)

At this point, we should edit the file and resolve the conflict, and complete the resolution as per usual.
And then we push back to our fork on GitHub!

$ git push
Enumerating objects: 7, done.
Counting objects: 100% (7/7), done.
Delta compression using up to 8 threads
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 999 bytes | 999.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
remote: Resolving deltas: 100% (1/1), completed with 1 local
remote: object.
To github.com:user/fork.git
8b2476c..c8a7e0a main -> main

If we jump back to the GitHub UI at this point and open a PR, it should tell us “These branches can be
automatically merged” which is music to everyone’s ears.
Once you have the upstream remote set up, all you have to do to sync in the future is do the
git fetch upstream and then merge or rebase your stuff with it.
Chapter 18

Reverting: Undoing Commits

Let’s say you made some changes and committed them, but they actually botched everything up. You
want to just revert to an earlier version of the file.
There’s the cheesy way to do this that might have already occurred to you: detach the head to an earlier
commit where the file was like you wanted it, make a copy of the file someplace safe, then reattach the
head to main, then copy the old file over the existing one in your working tree. And add and commit!
But let’s be more proper, and we can do that with git revert.
Reverting allows us to actually undo the changes of a single commit, even if it wasn’t the one that got you
to the point you’re at now. That is, let’s say you’ve made 30 commits, but it turns out you don’t actually
want commit number 4 to be there any longer. You can revert just that one!
Performing a standard revert will actually make a new commit, and doesn’t erase any old commits. In
this way, it’s not rewriting history so using this method is safe to revert commits that have already been
pushed.

18.1 Performing the Revert

It’s pretty straightforward. You look back in the log for the commit ID you’re interested in reverting, and
revert it.
For example, if you have this in the log:

commit 9fef4fe6d42b91c12b5217829e8d98d738f84d61
Author: Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall <beej@beej.us>
Date: Fri Jul 26 16:59:44 2024 -0700

Added Line 50

and you decided you didn’t want that commit any longer, you could revert it by its commit ID. Here I’ll
just type the first few characters of the hash because that’s enough:

$ git revert 9fef4

Auto-merging foo.txt
[main de415f4] Revert "Added Line 50"
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

There’s no conflict (more on that, below) in this example, so it just pops me into my editor and allows me
to edit the commit message. Remember that the revert makes a new commit!

90
 Chapter 18. Reverting: Undoing Commits 91

1 Revert "Added Line 50"

2

3 This reverts commit 9fef4fe6d42b91c12b5217829e8d98d738f84d61.

I save the file and git status tells me we’re clean.

Another git log will show the revert commit:

$ git log
commit de415f4f0cd645b1e551a6ac56e13f73850c88db (HEAD -> main)
Author: Brian "Beej Jorgensen" Hall <beej@beej.us>
Date: Fri Jul 26 17:01:54 2024 -0700

Revert "Added Line 50"

This reverts commit 9fef4fe6d42b91c12b5217829e8d98d738f84d61.

You can revert any commit, even commits that were themselves reverts! Revert the revert!
Now that was an example where the revert went smoothly. But what if you’ve made some changes since
the revert commit that were close to the changes in the revert commit itself? Can it conflict? Of course it
can!

18.2 Revert Conflicts

Like with merging or rebasing, you can have conflicts with a revert. If you’re not familiar with conflict
resolution, please review the Rebasing Conflicts section, because it’s closest to how revert conflicts work.
An example of a conflict might be that if you changed line 37 in your code, then revert a commit that also
changed line 37 in the code, Git can’t figure out what to do with that. Should it revert it to what it was
before your commit, or before the earlier commit?
So there’s a revert conflict that must be resolved. And it works very much like the other conflicts we’ve
already seen.
If you try to revert and get a conflict, it will say something like this:

$ git revert 5af89a8985c001ec02409d77e093fb7be45495ff

Auto-merging foo.txt
CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in foo.txt
error: could not revert 5af89a8... Added Line 69
hint: After resolving the conflicts, mark them with
hint: "git add/rm <pathspec>", then run
hint: "git revert --continue".
hint: You can instead skip this commit with "git revert --skip".
hint: To abort and get back to the state before "git revert",
hint: run "git revert --abort".
hint: Disable this message with
hint: "git config advice.mergeConflict false"

And it points out we have a few options here. We can get even more info with our friend git status:

$ git status
On branch main
You are currently reverting commit 5af89a8.
(fix conflicts and run "git revert --continue")
(use "git revert --skip" to skip this patch)
(use "git revert --abort" to cancel the revert operation)
Chapter 18. Reverting: Undoing Commits 92

Unmerged paths:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
(use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution)
both modified: foo.txt

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

So what we can do here is one of these:

• Edit the file, fix the conflict, then git add it, then git revert --continue to go to the next
commit to be reverted (if any).
• Bail out completely with git revert --abort.
• Skip reverting this particular commit with git revert --skip. If you skip all the commits you
were reverting, it’s just like an abort.
If you fix the conflict, you’ll get to enter a commit message for the new commit just like before.

18.3 Reverting Multiple Commits

You can specify multiple reverts at the same time on the command line.
Here’s an example that reverts two commits:

$ git revert 4c0b3 81d2a

Auto-merging foo.txt
[main ab3169d] Revert "Added Line 50"
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
Auto-merging foo.txt
[main b63f003] Revert "Added Line 10"
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

And there will be two new revert commits after that. You’ll edit two revert commit messages over the
course of that revert.
You can also specify a range of commits. Be sure to do this in oldest-to-newest order, or you’ll get an
empty commit set passed error.

$ git revert 4c0b3^..81d2a

Auto-merging foo.txt
[main ab3169d] Revert "Added Line 50"
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)
Auto-merging foo.txt
[main b63f003] Revert "Added Line 10"
1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

Again, that will make a lot of commits, one per revert. You can squash those commits if you want to, or
you can use -n (“no commit”) to keep Git from committing until you’re ready.

% git revert -n ee71e 123e8

Auto-merging foo.txt
Auto-merging foo.txt

At this point, the file is staged with those two commits reverted. And you can now make a single commit
that holds them. And you can do the same thing specifying a range.
Of course, there might a conflict, and you’ll have to resolve those in the super fun way we’ve already
discussed.
Chapter 19

Reset: Moving Branches Around

Before we begin, using git reset rewrites history. This means that you shouldn’t use it on any branches
that other people might have copies of, i.e. branches that you have pushed.
Of course, this is a highly-recommended guideline, not a rule, and you can reset anything provided you
know what you’re doing and have good communication with your team.
But if you never reset a branch you haven’t pushed, you won’t get into trouble.
So what it is?
Doing a reset allows you change where the HEAD and your current branch point. You can move your
current branch to a different commit!
When you move a branch to another commit, the branch “becomes” the repo at the point of that commit,
including all the history that led up to that commit. The upshot is that all the commits that led to the old
branch point are now effectively gone, as shown in Figure 18.1.

Figure 19.1: If we reset main to commit 2, commits 3 and 4 will eventually be lost.

So be sure you mean it when you reset! You’ll be losing commits1 !

When doing a reset, you can ask Git to move the current branch to another commit, or to another branch,
or to anything else that identifies a commit.
Now, there is a question of what happens to the difference between your working tree at the old commit
and whatever it would be at the new commit.
And there we have some options: soft reset, mixed reset, and hard reset.
And which you choose controls what happens to the branch, the stage, and the working tree.
Note: in the following examples, I’m going to use the term “old commit” to refer to where the branch was
before the reset, and “new commit” to refer to where it will be after the reset.
With all three variants, the current branch moves to the new (specified) commit.
The summary of differences is:
• Soft:
• Stage: old commit
1
Git cleans up “unreachable” commits after some time has elapsed, so they won’t be instantly destroyed. But they’re on borrowed
time unless you create a new branch to hold them.

93
Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 94

• Working tree: old commit

• Mixed:
• Stage: new commit
• Working tree: old commit
• Hard:
• Stage: new commit
• Working tree: new commit

19.1 Soft Reset

When you run a git reset --soft, this resets the current branch to point to the given commit, and makes
the stage and working tree both have the changes that were present in the old commit.
The upshot is that git status will show your old commit’s changes as staged, and none of the files as
modified.
In other words, you’ll see the old state of your files on the stage ready to commit.
A common use for this might be to collapse some of your previous commits similar to what we did with
rebase and squashing commits.
Let’s say we have commits like this (pretend the numbers are the commit hashes):

commit 555 (HEAD -> main)

Fixed another typo again
commit 444
Fixed another typo
commit 333
Fixed a typo
commit 222
Implemented feature
commit 111
Added

That’s a gnarly-looking commit history. It would be nice to rewrite it (but if and only if you haven’t pushed
it yet!).
We can do that with a soft reset back to commit 111.
If we do this soft reset:

$ git reset --soft 111 # Again, pretend 111 is the commit hash

We’ll then be in this point with all the other commits gone…

commit 111 (HEAD -> main)

Added

Except importantly our files as they existed in commit 555 will now be staged and ready to commit.
That means with the soft reset the changes weren’t lost, but effectively commits 222-555 are all squished
together on the stage.
So we commit them:

$ git commit -m "Implemented feature"

And now we’re here with a nice commit history:

Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 95

commit 222 (HEAD -> main)

Implemented feature
commit 111
Added

And now, finally we can push, happy that our changes are presentable to the general public.
Again, we’ve rewritten history here. Don’t do this if you’ve already pushed those commits past
the one you’re resetting to.

19.2 Mixed Reset

When you run a git reset --mixed2 , this resets the current branch to point to the given commit, and it
modifies the stage to that commit, and it doesn’t change your working tree.
The upshot is that it will show files as “modified” with the changes of the old commit, and there will be
nothing on the stage.
Now, thinking about this, since the branch has moved to a commit with your files in one state, but your
working tree has the files in another state, the files must be modified with respect to the commit the branch
now points to.
And this is what happens. Your changes at the old commit will show up as modified files at the current
commit.
It’s like the soft reset, except instead of the old commit ending up on the stage, it ends up in the working
tree. You can stage it and commit it from here.
But that’s not all! Since the stage is also updated to the new commit, it means the stage is effectively
emptied.
In fact, this is the classic use for a mixed reset: git reset HEAD. This moves files from staged state back
to modified state.
In the glorious future past, a new command was introduced to do this:
git restore --staged. That’s the preferred method to use now.

This will reset the current branch to where it already was (assuming HEAD points to the current branch),
and reset the stage to be the same as that commit. This unstages the files that were there. And it changes
the working tree files to have the changes that were already present in those files at that point, which
would be any changes you introduced.
And that unstages the files!
Another use might be if you want to squash a bunch of unpushed commits but simply don’t want to stage
the changes at the old commit yet, leaving them as modified.

19.3 Hard Reset

This resets everything to a particular commit. The branch moves there. The stage is set to that commit.
The files in the working tree are set to that commit. All changes since that commit are lost.
Use this if you want to bail out. You’ve made some commits and decided that was the wrong way, and
you want to just roll them back entirely.
Again, only do this if you haven’t pushed!
If you do a hard reset, it will simply move the branch and reset your entire world (as it pertains to that
branch) to that point as if nothing had happened since. git status will report that everything is clean.
2
You can leave off the --mixed since it’s the default.
Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 96

19.4 Reset to a Divergent Branch

In the above examples, we’ve been resetting to a direct ancestor of our current commit. This is the common
case for using git reset.
But there’s no reason why you couldn’t reset to an entirely different divergent branch. It just moves the
branch there with exactly the same rules for soft, mixed, and hard that we’ve already covered.

19.5 Resetting Files

So far, we’ve been just doing resets on a commit-by-commit basis. But we could also do mixed resets
with specific files. We can’t so hard or soft resets with specific files, though—sorry!
For example, we can do a mixed reset to unstage a single file.
Let’s say we’re here:

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: bar.txt
modified: foo.txt

And we want to reset foo.txt off the stage, but leave bar.txt on there.

Again, we’d use git restore --staged in these modern times. But we’re going to press on
here for the sake of example.
So let’s specify just that file:

$ git reset foo.txt

Unstaged changes after reset:
M foo.txt

$ git status
On branch main
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: bar.txt

Changes not staged for commit:

(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working
directory)
modified: foo.txt

And there you have it.

19.6 Pushing Branch Changes to a Remote

Let’s say you’ve made a mess of things somehow and you have to reset a branch that you’ve already
pushed commits on. That is, you have to rewrite a public history.
First: get good communication with the team. They’re going to make fun of you for sure, but at least
they won’t hate you3 .

3
No guarantees. You shouldn’t rewrite commit history that is already public!! It makes a big mess!
Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 97

Never do a forced push without completely understanding why you’re doing it. Git is trying
to stop you from doing a push for a reason: your own good! Everyone else who has cloned the
repo will very likely be impacted and they need to be informed. Everybody. We use it here to
demonstrate when it is necessary.
Our process will be something like this:
1. Do the reset.
2. Do a forced push to your remote. For your protection, Git won’t push in this circumstance. You
have to override with a forced push.
Your coworkers will do something like this:
1. Do a git fetch to get the new branch position from the remote.
2. Stash or commit any local changes they need to preserve.
3. Maybe make a new branch at the old branch point in case they need to return to see old soon-to-be-
obliterated commits.
4. Do a reset of the branch in question to the remote branch commit. For example, if we’re resetting
the main branch, you would git reset --hard origin/main.
5. Pop their changes from the stash, if any.
6. Maybe apply earlier commits that got obliterated4 .
Note that your coworkers don’t necessarily need to do a hard reset; they could do a mixed reset, for
instance.

19.6.1 Forcing the Push

We have basically two options to use with git push here:
1. --force: just push the new branch position, damn the torpedoes5 .
2. --force-with-lease: only force push if the remote branch’s position is what we expect. In other
words, don’t force push if someone else has pushed a new commit in the meantime. This is a good
safety because no one should have pushed a new commit in the meantime since you’ve been in
communication with your team about this. Right?
If you try to --force-with-lease and someone else has pushed another commit to this branch in the
meantime, you’ll be presented with an error:

$ git push --force-with-lease

To git@github.com:user/repo.git
! [rejected] main -> main (stale info)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:user/repo.git'

If that happens, you’ll have to talk to your team to get them to stop, and then pull the changes, make sure
everyone is on board with the new reset, and then start again.
We’ll use --force-with-lease in our example.

19.6.2 Example: Rewrite Public History

First, let’s play the part of the person who is rewriting the public history.
The very first thing I’m going to do is coordinate with the team. If you’re already past this point, do it
right now.
Then we’ll start the rewrite. We’ll be on the main branch for this demo. Let’s reset to an earlier commit,
and we’ll assume that these commits we’re resetting past are already public and other team members
already have them.

4
Perhaps using git reflog and git cherry-pick or git cherry-pick -n and potentially git add -p, all of which are cov-
ered in later chapters. Along with judicious use of rebase, old commits or parts of old commits can be applied while keeping the
commit history clean.
5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Mobile_Bay#“Damn_the_torpedoes”
Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 98

$ git reset --hard 4849e6

HEAD is now at 4849e65 added line 3

So far no harm, but now we’re going to push this history change to our origin. And we’ll use
--force-with-lease for safety.

$ git push --force-with-lease

To git@github.com:user/repo.git
+ a2b7ac3...ce44516 main -> main (forced update)

Now we’ve publicly rewritten history. Tell the team, which you’ve been in contact with this entire time,
that you’ve done so. And they can begin to fix up their clones with much grumbling.

19.6.3 Example: Receiving Rewritten History

You’ve just received word from your coworker that public history on the main branch has been rewritten
and pushed to the remote, which we’ll assume is origin for this example.
First thing we should do is make sure we’re all backed up in whatever manner we need.
Perhaps a commit of the latest stuff:

$ git add [all files]

$ git commit -m "last commit before public reset"

Or a stash if we’re not ready to commit:

$ git stash

And perhaps make a new branch right here so we can revisit the old state of affairs for reference if we
have to:

$ git branch oldmain

And now it’s time for action. We need to fetch the new branch information.

$ git fetch origin

From git@github.com:user/repo.git
+ e7b133a...521a873 main -> origin/main (forced update)

We just fetched, so our clone doesn’t look different to us yet. But let’s put an end to that and get on the
same page as origin. This involves resetting our local main to be the same as it is on the remote tracking
branch origin/main. (Remember the latter has been force pushed to a different commit, and we want
our main to point to that commit, as well.)
Assuming we’re on branch main right now:

$ git reset --hard origin/main

And now we’re on the same page as origin.

If we had stashed things, let’s try to get them back, resolving any conflicts as per usual:

$ git stash pop

And if you want to refer to any old commits and you set up the oldmain branch as above, you can
git switch oldmain to examine them, and maybe use something like git cherry-pick to bring in any
functionality you need.
Chapter 19. Reset: Moving Branches Around 99

19.7 Resetting Without Moving HEAD

Using the reset feature moves the HEAD around by necessity. What if you just want to move a branch to
another commit but leave HEAD alone?
It can be done! But you can’t do it with a branch you have checked out right now. So either detach the
head or attach it to a different branch.
Instead of using git reset to do this, we’ll use git branch. Here’s an example:

$ git switch topic1

Switched to branch 'topic1'

$ git log
commit 97c4da49eda8de7b273003515a660945c (HEAD -> topic1)
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Aug 1 14:22:39 2024 -0700

fix a third typo

$ git branch --force main

$ git log
commit 97c4da49eda8de7b273003515a660945c (HEAD -> topic1, main)
Author: User <user@example.com>
Date: Thu Aug 1 14:22:39 2024 -0700

fix a third typo

See what happened to main? It moved to the current commit! You can see it in the output for the second
git log.

You could also specify a destination for main as a second argument if you wanted it to move somewhere
other than your current location.

19.8 Resetting to Remove Credentials

Did you accidentally commit some secret password into your repo? Can you use git reset to back out
of that commit?
• Have you pushed? Then NO. Your password is out in the wild. Change it now and never make that
mistake again.
• Have you not yet pushed? Yes. You can do it. But keep in mind the commit containing the password
will remain in your local repo until it is garbage collected.
If the answer was yes, you might find git reset -p useful to selectively reset parts of commits, something
we’ll cover in a later chapter.
Chapter 20

Appendix: Making a Playground

In programming circles in general, a playground is a place you can go to mess with code and tech and not
worry about messing up your production system.
And there are places you can go online to find these, but with Git, I find it’s just as easy to make your own
local repo.
Here’s a way to make a new local repo called playground out of the current directory. (You should not
be under a Git repo at this time; create the playground outside other existing repos.)

$ git init playground

Initialized empty Git repository in /user/playground/.git/

playground isn’t a special name. You can call it foo or anything. I’ll just use it for this example.

What that command did was create a new subdirectory called playground and create a Git repo in it.
Let’s continue at the end: how do you delete the repo? You just remove the directory.

$ rm -rf playground # delete the playground repo

And let’s create it again:

$ git init playground

We have all the power!

Note: This repo only exists on this computer; it has no remotes and no way to push. You could
add that stuff later, if you wanted, but playgrounds tend to be temporary areas where you’re just
trying things out.
Let’s go into the playground and check it out.

$ cd playground
$ ls -la
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 user group 18 Jul 13 14:43 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 user group 4096 Jul 13 14:43 ..
drwxr-xr-x 7 user group 119 Jul 13 14:43 .git

There’s a directory there called .git that has all the metadata in it.
Note: If we wanted to change this directory from a Git repo to just a normal directory, we could
run this:

100
Chapter 20. Appendix: Making a Playground 101

$ rm -rf .git # Delete the .git directory

Again, we have all the power! But let’s show some restraint and not do that yet.
What can we do?
What can’t we do? Let’s make a file and see where we stand:

$ echo "Hello, world" > hello.txt # Create a file

$ ls -l

total 4
-rw-r--r-- 1 user group 13 Jul 13 14:47 hello.txt

$ git status

On branch main

No commits yet

Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
hello.txt

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git

add" to track)

Now we have an untracked file.

We can git add it, we can git commit it, we can create branches, we can merge them and make conflicts
and resolve them and git rebase and git reset and all kinds of stuff.
We don’t have a remote, so the only things we can’t do involving pushing and pulling.
But it turns out we can even make that happen! Let’s see how.

20.1 Cloning Bare Repos

A bare repo is one without a working tree. You can’t go in there to see files, because they don’t exist in
there in a normal sense. The only thing that’s there is metadata and the commit snapshots.
You can clone, push, and pull bare repos.
Let’s make one (again, you could name it anything you want), noting the --bare command line option:

$ git init --bare origin_repo

Initialized empty Git repository in /user/origin_repo/

If you look in there (to be clear, you have no reason to) you’ll just see metadata and directories.
Before we can use it, we’d better clone it. For ease, we’ll do this from the same directory we created it.

$ git clone origin_repo playground

Cloning into 'playground'...
warning: You appear to have cloned an empty repository.
done.

It is empty, naturally. We haven’t made any commits.

Now we have two repos in this directory:
Chapter 20. Appendix: Making a Playground 102

• origin_repo: the bare repo we cloned, and:

• playground: the repo we cloned from it.
Let’s jump in there and see what’s up:

$ cd playground
$ git remote -v
origin /user/origin_repo (fetch)
origin /user/origin_repo (push)

We have remotes! Of course we do. We cloned this repo, and Git automatically sets up the origin remote.
And remember that origin is just an alias for some remote that’s identified somehow. We’re used to see-
ing remotes that start with https or ssh, but here’s an example of a remote that’s just another subdirectory
on your disk.
Let’s make a file and commit it, and see if we can push!

$ echo "Hello, world" > hello.txt

$ git add hello.txt

$ git commit -m added

[main (root-commit) 4a82a14] added
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 hello.txt

$ git push
Enumerating objects: 3, done.
Counting objects: 100% (3/3), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 907 bytes | 907.00 KiB/s, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0), pack-reused 0 (from 0)
To /user/origin_repo
* [new branch] main -> main

$ git branch -va

* main 4a82a14 added
remotes/origin/main 4a82a14 added

And we’ve successfully pushed our file up to origin.

Finally, let’s make another clone. First we’ll cd back down to where origin_repo is and clone again
this time into playground2:

$ git clone origin_repo playground2

Cloning into 'playground2'...
done.

Let’s cd in there and see what we have. It’s a clone of the repo, so we’d better see the hello.txt we
pushed in there from playground earlier.

$ cd playground2

$ ls
hello.txt

$ cat hello.txt
Hello, world

Voila! It’s there!

Chapter 20. Appendix: Making a Playground 103

Since playground and playground2 are both clones of the same repo, you can push from one and pull
from the other to get the changes.
You can even make conflicting changes and try to git pull or git pull --rebase and see how things
go wrong and how to fix them.
And if everything goes complete off the rails, you can just delete the directories and start again. It’s a
playground!

20.2 Automating Playground Builds

It can be tedious to continually destroy and recreate repos that you’re trying to learn from. I suggest
putting your commands in a shell script, which is just a text file that contains the commands to run.
Let’s say you make a new text file called buildrepo.sh and you put the following text in it:

rm -rf playground # Remove old playground

git init playground # Create a new one
cd playground
echo "Hello, world!" > hello.txt # Create hello.txt
echo "foobar" > foobar.txt # Create foobar.txt
git add hello.txt foobar.txt
git commit -m added
echo "foobar again" >> foobar.txt # Append text
git add foobar.txt
git commit -m updated

That’s just a bunch of shell commands. But here’s the fun bit: if you run sh (the shell) with buildrepo.sh
as an argument, it will run all those commands in order!

$ sh buildrepo.sh
Initialized empty Git repository in /user/playground/.git/
[main (root-commit) 2239237] added
2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 foobar.txt
create mode 100644 hello.txt
[main 0533186] updated
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Protip: If you run sh -x buildrepo.sh it will also show you the commands it is running.

After that, we can cd in there and see what happened:

$ cd playground
$ git log
commit 05331869d77973dfbac38a31c40a44f99225e85d
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sat Jul 13 15:19:42 2024 -0700

updated

commit 2239237cc44d11e9479dcc610e5d02ad283766ce
Author: User Name <user@example.com>
Date: Sat Jul 13 15:19:41 2024 -0700

added

$ cat foobar.txt
Chapter 20. Appendix: Making a Playground 104

foobar
foobar again

By putting the initialization commands in a shell script, it’s almost like having a “saved game” at that
point. You can just rerun the shell script any time you want the same playground set up.
Chapter 21

Appendix: Getting Out of Editors

If you try to git commit and don’t specify -m for a message, or if you git pull and there’s a non-fast-
forward merge, or if you git merge and there’s a non-fast-forward merge and you don’t specify -m, or
what I’m sure are a host of other reasons, you might get popped into an editor.
And you might not be familiar with that editor.
So here’s how to get out of it.
• Nano: If the editor says “Nano” or “Pico” in the upper left, then edit the commit message (if you
want), then then hit CTRL-X, and then hit Y to save, then ENTER to accept the given filename.
• Vim: If the screen has a bunch of ~ characters down the left and a crazy-looking file name at the
bottom maybe with the word All, you’re in Vim or some other vi (“vee eye”) variant. Press i, then
type a message (if you want), then hit the ESC key in the upper left, then type two capital Zs in a row.
ZZ. That should save and exit. Learning Vim1 is beyond the scope of this guide, but this author
thinks it’s worth it for the editing speed you can achieve.

1
https://www.openvim.com/

105
Chapter 22

Appendix: Errors and Scary Messages

22.1 Detached Head

Did you get this alarmingly guillotinesque message?

You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make
experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any
commits you make in this state without impacting any branches by
switching back to a branch.

If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create,

you may do so (now or later) by using -c with the switch command.
Example:

git switch -c <new-branch-name>

Or undo this operation with:

git switch -

Turn off this advice by setting config variable advice.detachedHead

to false

HEAD is now at 0da5af9 line 1

This means that you’ve checked out a commit directly instead of checking out a branch. That is, your
HEAD is no longer attached to a branch, i.e. it is “detached”.

To get out of this, you can:

1. Undo the checkout that got you detached:

git switch -

2. Switch to another branch entirely:

git switch main

3. Make a new branch here and check it out:

git switch -c newbranch

And now your HEAD is no longer detached.

106
Chapter 22. Appendix: Errors and Scary Messages 107

22.2 Upstream Branch Name Doesn’t Match Current

Did you accidentally run git branch -c newbranch when you meant to run git switch -c newbranch?
Because if you did, it could land you here:

fatal: The upstream branch of your current branch does not match
the name of your current branch. To push to the upstream branch
on the remote, use

git push origin HEAD:main

To push to the branch of the same name on the remote, use

git push origin HEAD

To choose either option permanently, see push.default in 'git help config'.

To avoid automatically configuring an upstream branch when its name

won't match the local branch, see option 'simple' of branch.autoSetupMerge
in 'git help config'.

Let’s check our branch names to see what’s going on:

$ git branch -vv

main fc645f2 [origin/main] line 2
* newbranch 7c21054 [origin/main: behind 1] line 1

That tells us our local branch names and, in brackets, the corresponding remote-tracking branch. Notice
anything fishy?
It seems main corresponds with origin/main.
And that newbranch also corresponds with origin/main! How?!
Well, when you did git branch -c newbranch, that copies the current branch (main in this example)
into the other branch, including its remote-tracking branch. Bad news, since you really want newbranch
to correlate to origin/newbranch, if anything.
You have a few options.
1. You want to push newbranch up to the origin and track it as origin/newbranch.
Just do this to push and change the remote-tracking branch name:

$ git push -u origin newbranch

2. You just want this to be a local branch and don’t need it on the remote.
In this case, just unset the upstream:

$ git branch --unset-upstream newbranch

22.3 Current Branch Has No Upstream Branch

Trying to push and getting this message?

fatal: The current branch topic1 has no upstream branch.

To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use
Chapter 22. Appendix: Errors and Scary Messages 108

git push --set-upstream origin topic1

To have this happen automatically for branches without a tracking

upstream, see 'push.autoSetupRemote' in 'git help config'

This just means there’s no upstream tracking branch for topic1—it’s just a local branch.
If you do want to push this branch, just follow the suggested instruction.
If you are pushing from the wrong branch by accident, switch to the right one first.
Index

.gitignore file, 41–44 Repo creation, 13

And subdirectories, 42 SSH setup, 14
Boilerplate, 44
Location, 42 HEAD, 20
Negated rules, 43 Detached, 20, 106
Wildcards, 43 With branches, 27

Bare repo, 101 Ignoring files, see .gitignore

Branches, 25, 33
Creating, 28 Log, 19
Deleting, 26, 32
Merging, 26, 34
on GitHub, see GitHub, Branches
Compared to Rebasing, 69
Remote tracking, 48–50
Conflicts, 34–38
Branching
Fast-forward, 30–31
Set upstream, 48
origin, see Remotes, origin
Clone, 6–7, 101
Collaboration Playground, 100
Across branches, 64–68 Automating, 103
with GitHub, 18 Cloning, 101
Commit, 4, 11 Pulling, 27, 103
Communication, 64 Pushing, 11, 18, 102
Configuration, 7 Branch to remote, 49
Name and Email, 7
Rebasing, 69
Detached HEAD, see HEAD, Detached And pulling, 71
Compared to Merging, 69
Exiting editors, 105
Conflicts, 71
Fast-forward, see Merging, Fast-forward Fixup, 77
File States, 51–53 Squashing commits, 74
Modified, 51 Recursion, see Recursion
Staged, 51 Remotes, 45–47
Unmodified, 51 Adding, 46
Untracked, 51 Listing, 45
origin, 8, 45
git checkout, 21 Remote branches, 45
Git Log, see Log Renaming, 46
git push --set-upstream, see Branching, Set Removing files, 62
upstream Renaming, 61
git push -u, see Branching, Set upstream Reverting, 61
git switch, 22
GitHub, 5 Shell scripts, 103
Account creation, 13 Stage, 10
Authentication, 14 Stashing, 79–82
Branches, 50 Conflicts, 81
Cloning, 17 New files, 82
Cloning with GitHub CLI, 17 Subdirectories, 39–40
Cloning with SSH, 17 Subprojects, 39
GitHub CLI setup, 14
Translations, 2

109
INDEX 110

Untracking files, 52

Workflow
basic, 5–12
Dev branch, 66
File states, 51
One Branch, 65
One Branch per Dev, 65