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

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In this section, you would find the best practices and recommendations that do not fit cleanly in one of the areas described before, namely starting a project, working on a project, and integrating changes.

Don't panic, recovery is almost always possible

As long as you have committed your work, storing your changes in the repository, it will not be lost. It would only perhaps be misplaced. Git also tries to preserve your current un-committed (unsaved) work, but it cannot distinguish for example between the accidental and the conscious removing of all the changes to the working directory with git reset --hard. Therefore, you'd better commit or stash your current work before trying to recover lost commits.

Thanks to the reflog (both for the specific branch and for the HEAD ref), it is easy to undo most operations. Then, there is the list of stashed changes (see Chapter 4, Managing Your Worktree), where your changes might hide. And there is git fsck as the last resort. See...