8. Recovering from Mistakes | Git Version Control Cookbook

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Table Of Contents

Git Version Control Cookbook

By : Olsson, Voss

4 (3)

Git Version Control Cookbook

4 (3)

By: Olsson, Voss

Overview of this book

This practical guide contains a wide variety of recipes, taking you through all the topics you need to know about to fully utilize the most advanced features of the Git system. If you are a software developer or a build and release engineer who uses Git in your daily work and want to take your Git knowledge to the next level, then this book is for you. To understand and follow the recipes included in this book, basic knowledge of Git command-line code is mandatory.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Navigating Git

1. Navigating Git

Introduction

Git's objects

The three stages

Viewing the DAG

Extracting fixed issues

Getting a list of the changed files

Viewing history with Gitk

Finding commits in history

Searching through history code

2. Configuration

2. Configuration

Configuration targets

Querying the existing configuration

Templates

A .git directory template

A few configuration examples

Git aliases

The refspec exemplified

3. Branching, Merging, and Options

3. Branching, Merging, and Options

Introduction

Managing your local branches

Branches with remotes

Forcing a merge commit

Using git rerere to merge known conflicts

The difference between branches

4. Rebase Regularly and Interactively, and Other Use Cases

4. Rebase Regularly and Interactively, and Other Use Cases

Introduction

Rebasing commits to another branch

Continuing a rebase with merge conflicts

Rebasing selective commits interactively

Squashing commits using an interactive rebase

Changing the author of commits using a rebase

Auto-squashing commits

5. Storing Additional Information in Your Repository

5. Storing Additional Information in Your Repository

Introduction

Adding your first Git note

Separating notes by category

Retrieving notes from the remote repository

Pushing notes to a remote repository

Tagging commits in the repository

6. Extracting Data from the Repository

6. Extracting Data from the Repository

Introduction

Extracting the top contributor

Finding bottlenecks in the source tree

Grepping the commit messages

The contents of the releases

7. Enhancing Your Daily Work with Git Hooks, Aliases, and Scripts

7. Enhancing Your Daily Work with Git Hooks, Aliases, and Scripts

Introduction

Using a branch description in the commit message

Creating a dynamic commit message template

Using external information in the commit message

Preventing the push of specific commits

Configuring and using Git aliases

Configuring and using Git scripts

Setting up and using a commit template

8. Recovering from Mistakes

8. Recovering from Mistakes

Introduction

Undo – remove a commit completely

Undo – remove a commit and retain the changes to files

Undo – remove a commit and retain the changes in the staging area

Undo – working with a dirty area

Redo – recreate the latest commit with new changes

Revert – undo the changes introduced by a commit

Reverting a merge

Viewing past Git actions with git reflog

Finding lost changes with git fsck

9. Repository Maintenance

9. Repository Maintenance

Introduction

Pruning remote branches

Running garbage collection manually

Turning off automatic garbage collection

Splitting a repository

Rewriting history – changing a single file

Back up your repositories as mirror repositories

A quick submodule how-to

Subtree merging

Submodule versus subtree merging

10. Patching and Offline Sharing

10. Patching and Offline Sharing

Introduction

Creating patches

Creating patches from branches

Applying patches

Sending patches

Creating Git bundles

Using a Git bundle

Creating archives from a tree

11. Git Plumbing and Attributes

11. Git Plumbing and Attributes

Introduction

Displaying the repository information

Displaying the tree information

Displaying the file information

Writing a blob object to the database

Writing a tree object to the database

Writing a commit object to the database

Keyword expansion with attribute filters

Metadata diff of binary files

Storing binaries elsewhere

Checking the attributes of a file

Attributes to export an archive

12. Tips and Tricks

12. Tips and Tricks

Introduction

Using git stash

Saving and applying stashes

Debugging with git bisect

Using the blame command

Color UI in the prompt

Autocompletion

Bash prompt with status information

More aliases

Interactive add

Interactive add with Git GUI

Ignoring files

Showing and cleaning ignored files

Index

Index

Finding lost changes with git fsck

Another tool exists in Git that can help you find and recover lost commits and even blobs (files), which is git fsck. The fsck command tests the object database and verifies the SHA-1 ID of the objects and the connections they make. The command can also be used to find objects that are not reachable from any named reference, as it tests all the objects found in the database, which are under the .git/objects folder.

Getting ready

Again, we'll use the hello world repository. If you make a fresh clone, make sure to run the scripts for this chapter (04_undo_dirty.sh), so there will be some objects for git fsck to consider. The scripts can be found on the book's homepage. If you just reset the master branch after performing the other recipes in the chapter, everything is ready.

We can create the fresh clone as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/dvaske/hello_world_cookbook.git
$ cd hello_world_cookbook

We can reset an existing clone as follows:

$ cd hello_world_cookbook...

CONTINUE READING

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