Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Kenneth Geisshirt, Emanuele Zattin(EUR), Aske Olsson, Rasmus Voss
Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Kenneth Geisshirt, Emanuele Zattin(EUR), Aske Olsson, Rasmus Voss

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular tools for versioning. With over 100 practical, self-contained tutorials, this updated version of the bestselling Git Version Control Cookbook examines the common pain points and best practices to help you solve problems related to versioning. Each recipe addresses a specific problem and offers a proven, best-practice solution with insights into how it works. You’ll get started by learning about the Git data model and how it stores files, along with gaining insights on how to commit changes to a database. Using simple commands, you’ll also understand how to navigate through the database. Once you have accustomed yourself to the basics, you’ll explore techniques to configure Git with the help of comprehensive examples and configuration targets. Further into the book, you’ll get up to speed with branches and recovery from mistakes. You’ll also discover the features of Git rebase and how to use regular Git to merge other branches. The later chapters will guide you in exploring Git notes and learning to utilize the update, list, and search commands. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll focus on repository maintenance, patching, and offline sharing. By the end of this book, you’ll have grasped various tips and tricks, and have a practical understanding of best-practice solutions for common problems related to versioning.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Rewriting history – changing a single file


In this example, we'll see how we can use Git filter-branch to remove sensitive data from a file throughout the repository history.

Getting ready

For simplicity, we'll use a very simple example repository. It contains a few files. One of them is .credentials, which contains a username and password. Start by cloning the repository and changing the directory, as shown in the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_Remove-Credentials.git 
$ cd Git-Version-Control-Cookbook-Second-Edition_Remove-Credentials 

Before proceeding, you can take a look at the content of the repository using ls and examine the history with git log.

How to do it...

  1. As we need to modify a file when rewriting the history of this repository, we'll use the tree-filter option to filter the branch. The .credentials file looks as follows:
username = foobar
password = verysecret 
  1. All we need to do is remove everything after...