Git Cheatsheet (survival level)

Here is a set of some of the most common things you’ll need to do in your day-to-day workflow with Git.

Pro Tip 1: you can get man pages for any git command by inserting a hyphen. As in: “man git-fetch” or “man git-merge”

Pro Tip 2: install the cheat gem for a really long cheat sheet available in your terminal.

What’s going on?

• What branch am I on? Which files are modified, which are staged, which are untracked, etc?

  git status

Fetch, Pull, and Push

• Get all new changes, and remote branch refs

  git fetch

• Do a git fetch and (if possible) a merge on the current branch

  git pull

• Push commits to the origin/master (like an SVN commit):

  git push origin master

• Push commits on a non-master branch:

  git push origin your_branch_name

Branching

• See a list of local branches

  git branch

• Switch to an existing branch

  git checkout existing_branch_name

• Create a new branch and switch to it:

  git checkout -b new_branch_name

Merging and Stashing

• Merge my working branch into current branch:

  git merge working_branch_name

• Temporarily clear my stage so I can switch to another branch (“stashing”):

  git stash

• Get my stashed stuff back, leaving it in the list of stashes:

  git stash apply

• Get my stashed stuff back, removing it from the list:

  git stash pop

History, Conflicts, and Fixing Mistakes

• See the log of commits:

  git log

• See what changes were made in a given commit:

  git show COMMIT_HASH

• See more detailed log information:

  git whatchanged

• Get rid of all the changes I’ve made since last commit:

  git reset --hard

• Get rid of the changes for just one file:

  git checkout FILENAME

• Make HEAD point to the state of the codebase as of 2 commits ago:

  git checkout HEAD^^

• Fix a conflict (w/ system’s default graphical diff tool):

  git mergetool

• Revert a commit (be careful with merges!):

  git revert <commit hash>

• Revert a commit from a merge:

  git revert -m<number of commits back in the merge to revert> <hash of merge commit>

(e.g. git revert -m1 4f76f3bbb83ffe4de74a849ad9f68707e3568e16 will revert the first commit back in the merge performed at 4f76f3bbb83ffe4de74a849ad9f68707e3568e16)

Git in Bash

When using Git, it’s very handy (read: pretty much mandatory) to have an ambient cue in your shell telling you what branch you’re currently on. Use this function in your .profile/.bashrc/.bash_profile to enable you to place your Git branch in your prompt:

function parse_git_branch {
  git branch --no-color 2> /dev/null | sed -e '/^[^*]/d' -e 's/* \(.*\)/(\1)/'
}