Menu
To get the full experience you should listen while you read. Git is actually sooo hard. Not just to learn, but also to use consistently. And I say that as a person who used it for probably over ten years.
There are four fundamental elements in the Git Workflow.Working Directory, Staging Area, Local Repository and Remote Repository.
Git has three main states that your files can reside in: modified, staged, and committed: Modified means that you have changed the file but have not committed it to your database yet.
A git repository is simply a directory containing a special .git directory.
This is different from "centralised" version-control systems (like subversion), where a "repository" is hosted on a remote server, which you checkout into a "working copy" directory. With git, your working copy is the repository.
Simply run git init in the directory which contains the files you wish to track.
For example,
cd ~/code/project001/
git init
This creates a .git (hidden) folder in the current directory.
To make a new project, run git init with an additional argument (the name of the directory to be created):
git init project002
(This is equivalent to: mkdir project002 && cd project002 && git init)
To check if the current current path is within a git repository, simply run git status - if it's not a repository, it will report "fatal: Not a git repository"
You could also list the .git directory, and check it contains files/directories similar to the following:
$ ls .git
HEAD config hooks/ objects/
branches/ description info/ refs/
If for whatever reason you wish to "de-git" a repository (you wish to stop using git to track that project). Simply remove the .git directory at the base level of the repository.
cd ~/code/project001/
rm -rf .git/
Caution: This will destroy all revision history, all your tags, everything git has done. It will not touch the "current" files (the files you can currently see), but previous changes, deleted files and so on will be unrecoverable!
Included with git — Run git gui from the command line, and the Windows msysgit installer adds it to the Start menu.
Git GUI can do a majority of what you'd need to do with git. Including stage changes, configure git and repositories, push changes, create/checkout/delete branches, merge, and many other things.
One of my favourite features is the "stage line" and "stage hunk" shortcuts in the right-click menu, which lets you commit specific parts of a file. You can achieve the same via git add -i, but I find it easier to use.
It isn't the prettiest application, but it works on almost all platforms (being based upon Tcl/Tk)
Screenshots | a screencast
Also included with git. It is a git history viewer, and lets you visualise a repository's history (including branches, when they are created, and merged). You can view and search commits.
Goes together nicely with git-gui.
Mac OS X application. Mainly an equivalent of git log, but has some integration with github (like the "Network view").
Looks pretty, and fits with Mac OS X. You can search repositories. The biggest critisism of Gitnub is that it shows history in a linear fashion (a single branch at a time) - it doesn't visualise branching and merging, which can be important with git, although this is a planned improvement.
Download links, change log and screenshots | git repository
Intends to be a "gitk clone for OS X".
It can visualise non-linear branching history, perform commits, view and search commits, and it has some other nice features like being able to "Quicklook" any file in any revision (press space in the file-list view), export any file (via drag and drop).
It is far better integrated into OS X than git-gui/gitk, and is fast and stable even with exceptionally large repositories.
The original git repository pieter has not updated recently (over a year at time of writing). A more actively maintained branch is available at brotherbard/gitx - it adds "sidebar, fetch, pull, push, add remote, merge, cherry-pick, rebase, clone, clone to"
Download | Screenshots | git repository | brotherbard fork | laullon fork
From the homepage:
SmartGit is a front-end for the distributed version control system Git and runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. SmartGit is intended for developers who prefer a graphical user interface over a command line client, to be even more productive with Git — the most powerful DVCS today.
You can download it from their website.
Download
TortoiseSVN Git version for Windows users.
It is porting TortoiseSVN to TortoiseGit The latest release 1.2.1.0 This release can complete regular task, such commit, show log, diff two version, create branch and tag, Create patch and so on. See ReleaseNotes for detail. Welcome to contribute this project.
Download
QGit is a git GUI viewer built on Qt/C++.
With qgit you will be able to browse revisions history, view patch content and changed files, graphically following different development branches.
Download
gitg is a git repository viewer targeting gtk+/GNOME. One of its main objectives is to provide a more unified user experience for git frontends across multiple desktops. It does this not be writing a cross-platform application, but by close collaboration with similar clients for other operating systems (like GitX for OS X).
Download: releases or source
Gitbox is a Mac OS X graphical interface for Git version control system. In a single window you see branches, history and working directory status.
Everyday operations are easy: stage and unstage changes with a checkbox. Commit, pull, merge and push with a single click. Double-click a change to show a diff with FileMerge.app.
Download
The Gity website doesn't have much information, but from the screenshots on there it appears to be a feature rich open source OS X git gui.
Download or source
Meld is a visual diff and merge tool. You can compare two or three files and edit them in place (diffs update dynamically). You can compare two or three folders and launch file comparisons. You can browse and view a working copy from popular version control systems such such as CVS, Subversion, Bazaar-ng and Mercurial [and Git].
Downloads
A Git GUIfor OSX by Steve Dekorte.
At a glance, see which remote branches have changes to pull and local repos have changes to push. The git ops of add, commit, push, pull, tag and reset are supported as well as visual diffs and visual browsing of project hieracy that highlights local changes and additions.
Free for 1 repository, $25 for more.
Download
Focuses on making Git easy to use. Features a native Cocoa (mac-like) UI, fast repository browsing, cloning, push/pull, branching/merging, visual diff, remote branches, easy access to the Terminal, and more.
By making the most commonly used Git actions intuitive and easy to perform, Sprout (formerly GitMac) makes Git user-friendly. Compatible with most Git workflows, Sprout is great for designers and developers, team collaboration and advanced and novice users alike.
Download | Website
A feature-rich Git GUI for Mac OSX. 30-day free trial, $59USD for a single-user license.
Download | Website
EGit is an Eclipse Team provider for the Git version control system. Git is a distributed SCM, which means every developer has a full copy of all history of every revision of the code, making queries against the history very fast and versatile.
The EGit project is implementing Eclipse tooling on top of the JGit Java implementation of Git.
Download | Website
Open Source for Windows - installs everything you need to work with Git in a single package, easy to use.
Git Extensions is a toolkit to make working with Git on Windows more intuitive. The shell extension will intergrate in Windows Explorer and presents a context menu on files and directories. There is also a Visual Studio plugin to use git from Visual Studio.
Download
Big thanks to dbr for elaborating on the git gui stuff.
SourceTree is a free Mac client for Git, Mercurial and SVN. Built by Atlassian, the folks behind BitBucket, it seems to work equally well with any VC system, which allows you to master a single tool for use with all of your projects, however they're version-controlled. Feature-packed, and FREE.
Expert-Ready & Feature-packed for both novice and advanced users:
Review outgoing and incoming changesets. Cherry-pick between branches. Patch handling, rebase, stash / shelve and much more.
Download | Website
Well, despite the fact that you asked that we not "simply" link to other resources, it's pretty foolish when there already exists a community grown (and growing) resource that's really quite good: the Git Community Book. Seriously, this 20+ questions in a question is going to be anything but concise and consistent. The Git Community Book is available as both HTML and PDF and answers many of your questions with clear, well formatted and peer reviewed answers and in a format that allows you to jump straight to your problem at hand.
Alas, if my post really upsets you then I'll delete it. Just say so.
The ability to have git ignore files you don't wish it to track is very useful.
To ignore a file or set of files you supply a pattern. The pattern syntax for git is fairly simple, but powerful. It is applicable to all three of the different files I will mention bellow.
Great Example from the gitignore(5) man page:
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
# Documentation/gitignore.html
# file.o
# lib.a
# src/internal.o
[...]
$ cat .git/info/exclude
# ignore objects and archives, anywhere in the tree.
*.[oa]
$ cat Documentation/.gitignore
# ignore generated html files,
*.html
# except foo.html which is maintained by hand
!foo.html
$ git status
[...]
# Untracked files:
[...]
# Documentation/foo.html
[...]
Generally there are three different ways to ignore untracked files.
1) Ignore for all users of the repository:
Add a file named .gitignore to the root of your working copy.
Edit .gitignore to match your preferences for which files should/shouldn't be ignored.
git add .gitignore
and commit when you're done.
2) Ignore for only your copy of the repository:
Add/Edit the file $GIT_DIR/info/exclude in your working copy, with your preferred patterns.
Ex: My working copy is ~/src/project1 so I would edit ~/src/project1/.git/info/exclude
You're done!
3) Ignore in all situations, on your system:
Global ignore patterns for your system can go in a file named what ever you wish.
Mine personally is called ~/.gitglobalignore
I can then let git know of this file by editing my ~/.gitconfig file with the following line:
core.excludesfile = ~/.gitglobalignore
You're done!
I find the gitignore man page to be the best resource for more information.
How do you 'mark' 'tag' or 'release' a particular set of revisions for a particular set of files so you can always pull that one later?
Using the git tag command.
To simply "tag" the current revision, you would just run..
git tag -a thetagname
git tag -a 0.1
git tag -a 2.6.1-rc1 -m 'Released on 01/02/03'
To list the current tags, simply run git tag with no arguments, or -l (lower case L):
$ git tag -a thetagname # and enter a message, or use -m 'My tag annotation'
$ git tag -l
thetagname
To delete a tag, you use the -d flag:
$ git tag -d thetagname
Deleted tag 'thetagname'
$ git tag
[no output]
To tag a specific (previous) commit, you simply do..
git tag [tag name] [revision SHA1 hash]
For example:
git tag 1.1.1 81b15a68c6c3e71f72e766931df4e6499990385b
Note: by default, git creates a "lightweight" tag (basically a reference to a specific revision). The "right" way is to use the -a flag. This will launch your editor asking for a tag message (identical to asking for a commit message, you can also use the -m flag to supply the tag message on the command line). Using an annotated tag creates an object with its own ID, date, tagger (author), and optionally a GPG signature (using the -s tag).
For further information on this, see this post
git tag mytagwithmsg -a -m 'This is a tag, with message'
And to list the tags with annotations, use the -n1 flag to show 1 line of each tag message (-n245 to show the first 245 lines of each annotation, and so on):
$ git tag -l -n1
mytagwithmsg This is a tag, with message
For more information, see the git-tag(1) Manual Page
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With