Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Kenneth Geisshirt, Emanuele Zattin(EUR), Aske Olsson, Rasmus Voss
Book Image

Git Version Control Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Kenneth Geisshirt, Emanuele Zattin(EUR), Aske Olsson, Rasmus Voss

Overview of this book

Git is one of the most popular tools for versioning. With over 100 practical, self-contained tutorials, this updated version of the bestselling Git Version Control Cookbook examines the common pain points and best practices to help you solve problems related to versioning. Each recipe addresses a specific problem and offers a proven, best-practice solution with insights into how it works. You’ll get started by learning about the Git data model and how it stores files, along with gaining insights on how to commit changes to a database. Using simple commands, you’ll also understand how to navigate through the database. Once you have accustomed yourself to the basics, you’ll explore techniques to configure Git with the help of comprehensive examples and configuration targets. Further into the book, you’ll get up to speed with branches and recovery from mistakes. You’ll also discover the features of Git rebase and how to use regular Git to merge other branches. The later chapters will guide you in exploring Git notes and learning to utilize the update, list, and search commands. Toward the concluding chapters, you’ll focus on repository maintenance, patching, and offline sharing. By the end of this book, you’ll have grasped various tips and tricks, and have a practical understanding of best-practice solutions for common problems related to versioning.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Viewing past Git actions with git reflog


The reflog command stores information on updates to the tip of the branches in Git, where the normalgit logcommand shows the ancestry chain from HEAD, and the reflog command shows what HEAD has pointed to in the repository. This is your history in the repository, which tells you how you have moved between branches, created your commits and resets, and so on. Basically, anything that makes HEAD point to something new is recorded in the reflog. This means that, by going through the reflogcommand, you can find lost commits that none of your branches or other commits point to. This makes thereflog command a good starting point for trying to find a lost commit.

Getting ready

Again, we'll use the hello worldrepository. If you make a fresh clone, make sure to run the scripts for this chapter so that there will be some entries in thereflogcommand.

The scripts can be found on the book's home page. If you just reset themaster branch to origin/master after performing...