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

Chapter 12. Git Best Practices

The last chapter of Mastering Git presents a collection of generic and Git-specific version control recommendations and best practices. You have encountered many of these recommendations already in the earlier chapters; they are here as a summary and as a reminder. For details and the reasoning behind each best practice, you would be referred to specific chapters.

This chapter will cover issues of managing the working directory, creating commits and series of commits (pull requests), submitting changes for inclusion, and the peer review of changes.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • How to separate projects into repositories

  • What types of data to store in a repository and which files should Git ignore

  • What to check before creating a new commit

  • How to create a good commit and a good commit series (or, in other words, how to create a good pull request)

  • How to choose an effective branching strategy, and how to name branches and tags

  • How to review changes...