Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By : Ferdinando Santacroce
Book Image

Git Essentials - Second Edition

By: Ferdinando Santacroce

Overview of this book

Since its inception, Git has attracted skilled developers due to its robust, powerful, and reliable features. Its incredibly fast branching ability transformed a piece of code from a niche tool for Linux Kernel developers into a mainstream distributed versioning system. Like most powerful tools, Git can be hard to approach since it has a lot of commands, subcommands, and options that easily confuse newcomers. The 2nd edition of this very successful book will help you overcome this fear and become adept in all the basic tasks in Git. Building upon the success of the first book, we start with a brief step-by-step installation guide; after this, you'll delve into the essentials of Git. For those of you who have bought the first edition, this time we go into internals in far greater depth, talking less about theory and using much more practical examples. The book serves as a primer for topics to follow, such as branching and merging, creating and managing a GitHub personal repository, and fork and pull requests. You’ll then learn the art of cherry-picking, taking only the commits you want, followed by Git blame. Finally, we'll see how to interoperate with a Subversion server, covering the concepts and commands needed to convert an SVN repository into a Git repository. To conclude, this is a collection of resources, links, and appendices to satisfy even the most curious.
Table of Contents (8 chapters)

Rebasing

Now I want to tell you something about the git rebase command; a rebase is a common term while using a versioning system, and even in Git this is a hot topic.

Basically, with git rebase you rewrite history; with this statement, I mean you can use rebase command to achieve the following:

  • Combine two or more commits into a new one
  • Discard a previous commit you did
  • Change the starting point of a branch, split it, and much more

Reassembling commits

One of the widest uses of the git rebase command is for reordering or combining commits. For this first approach, imagine you have to combine two different commits.

Suppose we erroneously added half a grape in the shoppingList.txt file, then the other half, but at the end...