Painless Git

This is Painless Git beta.

1. Roadmap
2. Why? Why This?

Introduction

1. What is git, and Why do I Need It?
2. What This Book Aims to be
3. What this book is not
4. Who Am I?
5. References
6. Hey, Are There Any Conventions Used In this Book?
7. Warnings!
8. Exercises!
9. Let’s “Git” Started!

How This Book is Structured

1. What Are Interludes?

Welcome to the Sample!

1. Part I: Beginning

A Brief History of Git. The Briefest!

1. The Linux Kernel

Installing Git

1. Keeping Git up to Date

First Steps

1. Creating a New Repository
2. Of Working Copies and Repositories
3. Quick Detour: Tell Git A Little About Yourself
4. Okay, Back to Your First Commit

Fear of Commitment

1. The Three Step Dance
2. Staging Files
3. What it Means to Commit
4. The Anatomy of a Commit
5. Degrees of Uniqueness
6. Pushing Git

Branching

1. Branching: Split Apart
2. Don’t All These Branches Waste Space?
3. Merging: Come Together
4. There’s More to the Story

Branch Practice

1. Learn Git Branching
2. The Big Box About Branches Just Being Tags
3. Git Family Trees
4. You try!
5. Merges!
6. Get Rid of Them All!
7. The Two Rules of Deleting Branches
8. Extra Credit

Commits and Their Parents

1. Terminology
2. Playing Games With Your HEAD
3. Use Your HEAD

Configuring and Ignoring

1. Configuration: Here and Everywhere
2. Did What to the What Flag Now?
3. There. Are. Four. Files!
4. Just Because You Can, Doesn’t Mean You Should
5. Ignore this text. Fnord.
6. Git, Ignore!
7. Git, Forget!
8. .gitignore is Bliss
9. Legibility Matters
10. Personalized Ignorance

Reaching Out: Working with Git Remotes

1. Team Git Terminology
2. Who Does Git Know?
3. But Why Are There Entries for Fetch and Push?
4. Two Remotes, No Waiting
5. The Myth of Peer-to-Peer Git

Playing in the Sandbox

1. Clone a Repo!
2. The Github Option!
3. The Non-Github Option

Interlude: Oops! I Broke Git!

1. Let Git Help!
2. What Not To Do
3. Always Fetch Before You Push
4. First Steps to Fixing Git Problems
5. Reset or Revert
6. What’s With the Tilde?

Conflict Resolution

1. Play Along!
2. This is all in there!
3. Artisanal, Hand-Crafted Fixes
4. How Real People Resolve Git Conflicts
5. In Either Case

Solo Git

1. It’s Just Not That Hard
2. It’s a Free Backup System
3. Asking For Help Just Got Simpler
4. You Can Try New Stuff

Moving On

1. Part II: Refinement

Good Git Habits

1. Commit Messages: Say Something Worth Saying
2. The Short Message is for Humans!
3. Branch Names
4. Name Your Branches After Tasks

Small Commits

1. Commits Should be Small and Focused
2. So How Often is “All the Time” In Practice?
3. Worry About Merges, Not Commits

Branching Out

1. Workflow 0: No Branching
2. Workflow 1: Informal Branching
3. Workflow 2: Autonomous Feature Branching
4. Workflow 3: Formal Feature Branching
5. Workflow 4: Git Flow
6. Wait, What are Branch Folders?

Good Git Hygiene

1. Delete Old Branches
2. When is it safe to delete a branch?
3. Prune Frequently
4. Taking out the Trash: Garbage Collection in git

Interlude A: Tools

1. What If I Find A Better Tool?
2. Git GUIs: Pretty Commit Trees!
3. Diff/Merge Tools: Seeing What Changed, Fixing What Broke
4. The Command Line!

Wandering Without Getting Lost

Stashes: Quick, Hide Your Code!

1. Fun Notes For CS People!
2. Why Not Just Commit?
3. How to Actually Use Git Stash

More Branch Practice

Refined

1. Part III: Sophistication

Use Sparingly: Git Commands You Should Use Less

1. Amend: When What You Said Isn’t What You Meant
2. Amend Before Pushing
3. Squash: Pretending History Didn’t Happen
4. Rebase: Moving History
5. Cherry-Pick: Moving One Commit to a New Branch

The Cases for and Against Bubbles

1. The Case for Rebase
2. Keeping the Mystery out of Your History
3. The Verdict!
4. My Opinion

Delving Into .git

1. Of CAT and BAT
2. The Directories
3. Hold Up, Author Boy! You Don’t Get to Leave It Like That!

Interlude: Selective Staging

Hooks

1. Why would I want to do that?
2. Pro Tip:
3. Make it Executable

Interlude: Commits Revisited

1. Plumbing vs. Porcelain
2. First: Files in a Commit
3. Second: Git Doesn’t Actually Store Files
4. Text vs. Binary
5. Third: Git Compresses

Getting the Elephant out of the Repo: Git’s Large File System

1. Binary vs Text Files
2. What Are You Talking About?
3. The Twenty Gigabyte Repository
4. So Let’s Put Large Files Somewhere else!
5. Then Follow The Directions!
6. This Is All Easier if You Start Earlier

Shhh! We Are Talking About SSH!

1. First off, What is SSH?
2. What are the Benefits of Using SSH?
3. Okay, Good Enough! How do I use it?

Full Path Required

1. Added Awesome
2. Extra Awesome Non-Git Use of SSH

Who Am Us, Anyway?

1. A Quick Note About the Chapter Title:

Play It Again, Git: Using Git Rerere to Stop Repeating Yourself

It’s Ref-log, not Re-flog

1. Show
2. Expire
3. Delete
4. And That’s Pretty Much It!

The End!

1. Appendices

Appendix A: References

Appendix B: Glossary

Appendix C: Terminal Velocity: Getting Up to Speed on the Command Line

1. Tell Me What to Do: The Command
2. Tell Me How to Do It: The Flags
3. Tell Me What to Do It to: The Arguments
4. Putting it All Together
5. How do You Remember All This???
6. Commands and Command Suites
7. Unix-y Stuff

Appendix D: Commit or Commit-ish

1. Specific References
2. Relative References

Appendix E: SubGit

1. Step 0: Bookmark the SubGit Documentation Page
2. Step 1: Gather Information
3. Initial Config
4. Test! And Test Again!

About This Book

1. About the Text
2. About the Cover
3. Special Thanks