Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Git

5 (1)

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular types of Source Code Management (SCM) and Distributed Version Control System (DVCS). Despite the powerful and versatile nature of the tool enveloping strong support for nonlinear development and the ability to handle large projects efficiently, it is a complex tool and often regarded as “user-unfriendly”. Getting to know the ideas and concepts behind the architecture of Git will help you make full use of its power and understand its behavior. Learning the best practices and recommended workflows should help you to avoid problems and ensure trouble-free development. The book scope is meticulously designed to help you gain deeper insights into Git's architecture, its underlying concepts, behavior, and best practices. Mastering Git starts with a quick implementation example of using Git for a collaborative development of a sample project to establish the foundation knowledge of Git operational tasks and concepts. Furthermore, as you progress through the book, the tutorials provide detailed descriptions of various areas of usage: from archaeology, through managing your own work, to working with other developers. This book also helps augment your understanding to examine and explore project history, create and manage your contributions, set up repositories and branches for collaboration in centralized and distributed version control, integrate work from other developers, customize and extend Git, and recover from repository errors. By exploring advanced Git practices, you will attain a deeper understanding of Git’s behavior, allowing you to customize and extend existing recipes and write your own.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Mastering Git
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Extending Git


Git provides a few mechanisms to extend it. You can add shortcuts and create new commands, and add support for new transports; all without requiring to modify Git sources.

Command aliases for Git

There is one little tip that can make your Git command-line experience simpler, easier, and more familiar, namely, Git aliases. It is very easy in theory to create an alias. You simply need to create an alias.<command-name> configuration variable; its value is the expansion of alias.

One of the uses for aliases is defining short abbreviations for commonly used commands and their arguments. Another is creating new commands. Here are a couple of examples you might want to set up:

$ git config --global alias.co checkout
$ git config --global alias.ci commit
$ git config --global alias.lg log --graph --oneline --decorate
$ git config --global alias.aliases 'config --get-regexp ^alias\.'

The preceding setup means that typing, for example, git ci would be the same as typing git commit....