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

Managing worktrees and the staging area


In Chapter 3, Developing with Git, we learned that, besides the working directory where you work on changes, and the local repository where you store those changes as revisions, there is also a third section between them: the staging area, sometimes called the index.

In the same chapter, we also learned how to examine the status of the working directory, and how to view the differences. We saw how to create a new commit out of the working directory, or out of the staging area.

Now it is time to learn how to examine and modify the state of individual files.

Examining files and directories

It is easy to examine the contents of the working directory: just use the standard tools for viewing files (for example, an editor or a pager) and examining directories (for example, a file manager or the dir command). But how do we view the staged contents of a file, or the last committed version?

One possible solution is to use the git show command with the appropriate...