Simple Source Code Management with Git

(Up-to-date source of this post.)

Although I'm more of a sysadmin than a developer I often write scripts (in Perl or Bash). And I tend to use Git for tracking my programs. Every Git repository contains complete history of revisions and is not dependent on a central server or network access. I don't work within a big group of developers, so I try to keep things simple.

First time setup

The following steps are usually needed to be done only once on a machine and are global for all Git repositories:

git config --global user.name "Jeffrey Lebowski"
git config --global user.email "jeffrey.lebowski@dude.com"
git config --global color.ui true
git config alias.lol 'log --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit --graph --decorate'
git config --global core.editor vim
git config --global merge.tool vimdiff

The I can check the configuration like this:

git config --list

or

cat ~/.gitconfig

Starting a new Git repository

One way to start working with Git is to initialize a directory as a new Git repository:

mkdir project
cd project
git init

Notice a new .git directory. Then I take the snapshot of the contents of all files within current working directory (.):

git add .    # temporary storage - index

This command adds the files to a temporary staging area called index. To permanently store the index:

git commit   # permanent storage

I enter a commit message and I'm done.

Cloning a Git repository

I often need to get an already existing repository (some code me or someone else has already written and stored for example on GitHub):

## Any server with ssh and git
git clone ssh://[user@]server.xy/path/to/repo.git/
## GitHub
git clone git://github.com/ingydotnet/....git

Working with Git

When dealing with Git, it's best to work in small bits. Rule of thumb: if you can't summarize it in a sentence, you've gone too long without committing.

My typical working cycle is:

1. Work on my project.

2. Check whether something has changed:

git status

3. Check what has changed:

git diff

4. Add and commit changes (combines two steps in one git add + git commit):

git commit -am "commit message"

If I not only changed files but also added some new ones I have to add them explicitly:

git add newfile1 newfile2 newfolder3

and then commit as in step 4.

Excluding some files

To set certain files or patterns to be ignored by Git, I create a file called .gitignore in my project’s root directory:

# Don't track dot-files
.*
!/.gitignore

.gitignore is usually checked into Git and distributed along with everything else.