Mastering Git is meticulously designed to help you gain deeper insights into Git's architecture and its underlying concepts, behavior, and best practices.
Mastering Git starts with a quick implementation example of using Git for the collaborative development of a sample project to establish the foundation knowledge of Git's operational tasks and concepts. Furthermore, as you progress through the book, subsequent chapters provide detailed descriptions of the various areas of usage: from the source code archaeology, through managing your own work, to working with other developers. Version control topics are accompanied by in-detail description of relevant parts of Git architecture and behavior.
This book also helps augment your understanding to examine and explore your project's history, create and manage your contributions, set up repositories and branches for collaboration in centralized and distributed workflows, integrate work coming from other developers, customize and extend Git, and recover from repository errors. By exploring advanced Git practices, and getting to know details of Git workings, you will attain a deeper understanding of Git's behavior, allowing you to customize and extend existing recipes, and write your own.
Chapter 1, Git Basics in Practice, serves as a reminder of version control basics with Git. The focus will be on providing the practical aspects of the technology, showing and explaining basic version control operations for the development of an example project, and the collaboration between two developers.
Chapter 2, Exploring Project History, introduces the concept of the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) of revisions and explains how this concept relates to the ideas of branches, tags, and the current branch in Git. You will learn how to select, filter, and view the range of revisions in the history of a project, and how to find revisions using different criteria.
Chapter 3, Developing with Git, describes how to create such history and how to add to it. You will learn how to create new revisions and new lines of development. This chapter introduces the concept of the staging area for commits (the index), and explains how to view and read differences between the working directory, the index, and the current revision.
Chapter 4, Managing Your Worktree, focuses on explaining how to manage the working directory (the worktree) to prepare contents for a new commit. This chapter will teach the reader how to manage their files in detail. It will also show how to manage files that require special handling, introducing the concepts of ignored files and file attributes.
Chapter 5, Collaborative Development with Git, presents a bird's eye view of the various ways to collaborate, showing different centralized and distributed workflows. It will focus on the repository-level interactions in collaborative development. You will also learn here the concept of the chain of trust, and how to use signed tags, signed merges, and signed commits.
Chapter 6, Advanced Branching Techniques, goes deeper into the details of collaboration in a distributed development. It explores the relations between local branches and branches in remote repositories, and describes how to synchronize branches and tags. You will learn here branching techniques, getting to know various ways of utilizing different types of branches for distinct purposes (including topic branch workflow).
Chapter 7, Merging Changes Together, teaches you how to merge together changes from different parallel lines of development (that is, branches) using merge and rebase. This chapter will also explain the different types of merge conflicts, how to examine them, and how to resolve them. You will learn how to copy changes with cherry-pick, and how to apply a single patch and a patch series.
Chapter 8, Keeping History Clean, explains why one might want to keep clean history, when it can and should be done, and how it can be done. Here you will find step-by-step instructions on how to reorder, squash, and split commits. This chapter also demonstrates how can one recover from a history rewrite, and explains what to do if one cannot rewrite history: how to revert the effect of commit, how to add a note to it, and how to change the view of project's history.
Chapter 9, Managing Subprojects – Building a Living Framework, explains and shows different ways to connect different projects in the one single repository of the framework project, from the strong inclusion by embedding the code of one project in the other (subtrees), to the light connection between projects by nesting repositories (submodules). This chapter also presents various solutions to the problem of large repositories and of large files.
Chapter 10, Customizing and Extending Git, covers configuring and extending Git to fit one's needs. You will find here details on how to set up command line for easier use, and a short introduction to graphical interfaces. This chapter explains how to automate Git with hooks (focusing on client-side hooks), for example, how to make Git check whether the commit being created passes specified coding guidelines.
Chapter 11, Git Administration, is intended to help readers who are in a situation of having to take up the administrative side of Git. It briefly touches the topic of serving Git repositories. Here you will learn how to use server-side hooks for logging, access control, enforcing development policy, and other purposes.
Chapter 12, Git Best Practices, presents a collection of version control generic and Git-specific recommendations and best practice. Those cover issues of managing the working directory, creating commits and a series of commits (pull requests), submitting changes for inclusion, and the peer review of changes.
To follow the examples used in this book and run the provided commands, you will need the Git software, preferably version 2.5.0 or later. Git is available for free on every platform (such as Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X). All examples use the textual Git interface, using the bash shell.
To compile and run sample program, which development is tracked in Chapter 1, Git Basics in Practice, as a demonstration of using version control, you would need working C compiler and the make program.
If you are a Git user with reasonable knowledge of Git and you are familiar with basic concepts such as branching, merging, staging, and workflows, this is the book for you. If you have been using Git for a long time, this book will help you understand how Git works, make full use of its power, and learn about advanced tools, techniques, and workflows. The basic knowledge of installing Git and its software configuration management concepts is necessary.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, commands and their options, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, branch and tag names, dummy URLs, user input, environment variables, configuration options and their values are shown as follows: "For example, writing git log -- foo explicitly asks for the history of a path foo."
Additionally, the following convention is used: <file> denotes user input (here, the name of a file), $HOME denotes the value of environment variable, and tilde in a pathname is used to denote user's home directory (for example ~/.gitignore).
A block of code, or a fragment of a configuration file, is set as follows:
void init_rand(void)
{
srand(time(NULL));
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block (which is quite rare), the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
void init_rand(void)
{
srand(time(NULL));
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
carol@server ~$ mkdir -p /srv/git carol@server ~$ cd /srv/git carol@server /srv/git$ git init --bare random.git
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "The default description that Git gives to a stash (WIP on branch)."
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