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A day in the life for you and git...

Ben Halpern on September 28, 2019

Git is a technology which can be endlessly explained, but sometime demonstrations are best.

What does a typical day look like for you and your relationship with git?

Ashlee (she/her) • Sep 28 '19

I stick to the basics and really only add, commit, and push!

Ben Halpern • Sep 28 '19

What about branching practices?

Ashlee (she/her) • Sep 28 '19

Ah! I’ve always used feature branches off of master that are small and try to keep them open for only a few days.

Liyas Thomas • Sep 29 '19

he always push to master 🤓

Carlos Magno • Sep 29 '19

Me too, that's 99.9% what I do when I use git

Juri Strumpflohner • Sep 28 '19 • Edited

Hey, I know it's behind a paywall but I'm still gonna mention it. I published a git course a while back on Egghead (egghead.io/courses/productive-git-...). The goal of the course was not to be just another "I'm a git magician" type of course, but rather to show a few IMHO simple git commands that can dramatically improve your dev experience. In fact the course describes pretty much what I'm using on a daily basis and what proved to work (at least in my case).

It's a mixture of

creating feature branches
committing A LOT on those branches (using --fixup commits to later autosquash)
rebasing the branch with the latest master multiple times a day (depending on how much is going on on master meanwhile)
preparing my feature branch for PR via interactive rebase + autosquash
fast-forwarding it to master once reviewed and ready (to have a linear git history)

Also, using conventional git commit messages for better readability, like

feat(core): ....

build: upgrade version of...

fix(auth): ..

Martin Himmel • Sep 29 '19

When starting a change/set of changes:

git checkout master
git checkout -b some_feature

Then, it's typically a cycle of:

git add ./
git commit -m "Did some stuff"
git push

Once it's ready to merge, I create a PR on GitHub to merge with master.

After the merge:

git checkout master
git pull
git branch -d some_feature

Repeat until the end of time. 😄

Elliot Derhay • Sep 28 '19 • Edited

This is really only a summary. There are obviously other things occasionally.

$ git add <filename>
$ git commit
$ git push [remote]

And sometimes:

$ git checkout master
$ git merge release/x.y -m "Release x.y \
\
Changes:\
$(git changelog master..release/x.y)" --no-edit
$ git branch -d release/x.y
$ git push production

Some notes:

changelog is an alias for grabbing all commit messages in a range, minus any that come from branches that were merged (the opposite of excluding merge messages).
I haven't had time to figure out making this changelog functionality automatic when merging into master. Past attempts have failed unfortunately (although I'd be open to suggestions; I'm on Windows).

P.S.

I'll try to remember to share this alias if anyone wants it. I'll have to come back over lunch Monday and add it though.

Andrew Brown 🇨🇦 • Sep 28 '19 • Edited

10 years ago I had to resort to using more exotic commands such as rebase -i. The more confused your team is the more you need know git to get things unstuck.

gp    > git pull
gh    > git push
gcm > git checkout master
gcb  > git checkout -b
git push --tags

Frederik 👨‍💻➡️🌐 Creemers • Sep 28 '19

In the morning I do a quick git statusto see what the state of my repo is. Usually, I have a feature I'm working on, for which I have a branch. Sometimes I'm in the middle of some big task which I should have divided into smaller ones and committed ages ago, and the status command helps me rebuild the mental model of what changes I've made. So I make some more changes, add them and commit.

I try to remind myself to regularly merge "master" back into my feature branch. Resolving conflicts is easier when they're small.

I push my branch and make a PR fairly early, so that CircleCI runs all the tests for me. As an added benefit for remote work, build results trigger a message in our team's slack, so a push+build gives a visible sense of my progress to the rest of the team.

Then I request 1 or 2 team mates to review my code. I apply the review comments I agree with, and start discussions on the ones I disagree with. When all reviewers give it a thumbs up, the last reviewer merges it into master. Then the branch on Github is deleted, and I delete my local feature branch. I go back to master and pull, before creating a new feature branch for the next thing I work on.

Suzanne Aitchison • Sep 28 '19

We use Bitbucket at work and I normally find myself creating branches there instead of directly in git... Then the usual.. lots of commits and then push to origin

Fairly often find the need for a rebase, occasionally a cherry pick, and when everything goes terribly wrong, a bisect to find where it all went pear shaped 😂

Jack Harner 🚀 • Sep 28 '19

Pretty much only add, commit, push, & merge like everyone else has said. I've starting implenting some CI/CD type stuff into my projects so that has me working with Branches a lot more.

Biggest thing I'm really focusing on is writing more useful commit messages. Too many have just been "stuff" "more stuff" and "idk" which isn't a super huge problem when I'm working on stuff myself, but it definitely won't fly when actually working with a team.

Holy-Elie Scaïde • Sep 28 '19 • Edited

start:
if (no current task) goto New Task
Old Task: gco <branch-name
goto work
New Task: gcb <branch-name>
work:
(... bunch of typing here...)
Quick check: gst
Add All: gaa
Then commit: gc
if (not finished or no urge to backup everything online) goto work
push:
Push using the local branch name: ggpush
if (no conflicts) goto finish
Resolve conflict with master: gm master
(I used neovim and fugitive to resolve the actual conflict)
go to push
finish:
back to master: gco master
Pull all changes: gl
if (not end of day) goto start

oh-my-zsh with the git plugin for the aliases

Joshua Tzucker • Sep 28 '19

Mostly the basics, as others are saying. Add, commit, push, merge. Occasionally I'll have a legitimate reason to use cherry-pick, which always feels fun to use for some reason.

Even when it is just myself working on something, I try to avoid commands that "rewrite history", so I don't get in the habit of using them.

Things I've been trying to do more of lately:

Branching
- Keeps things clean and there is "no cost"
- Trying to do this more as opposed to stashing
Using tags
Better commit messages

A neat "trick" I recently learned is how to merge branches without switching to them. Not really needed often, but feels cool to use:

git fetch . {localBranchA}:{localBranchToMergeAInto}

Essentially you're saying fetch . (as an alias for local), get the head / latest commit of {localBranchA}, and then fast-forward {localBranchToMergeAInto} to point to it. See this for details.

Fernando B 🚀 • Sep 28 '19

I recently started using stash in addition to the all the basics. Other than that is pretty straightforward. You really get a good feeling of your workflow when collaborating. If you just use master to do everything you will just use the very bare bones of git.

Got a handful of aliases for my workflow, like, co, gs, gcm, gfu, gfo, gmu, gmo, etc just to avoid typing same things over and over lol.

Jessica Temporal • Sep 28 '19

add -p, commit, checkout (with -b sometimes), push and commit --amend mostly for all the typos I'm prone to making lol

Jesse Phillips • Sep 29 '19 • Edited

git gui
git fixup
gitk
git rebase -i
git rebase -i

I actually spend a lot of time looking at other's history. Code review, tracking down the cause of a bug.

From that I do spend a lot of time organizing my changes so other's can review and we have good records of why things are changing (better records).

Corey McCarty • Oct 1 '19

start the day by doing checkout of develop branch and pulling any changes. Next I'll checkout 'mine' branch and merge develop onto it before getting to work. Commits take place when I complete a unit of work or need to pull changes from somebody else. I've been using broken commits lately and amending them with follow up to fix the issue. After work is complete then I move back to develop and pull before merging my work onto develop and pushing it up to remote.

Note: I tend to trust IntelliJ with my adding and merging.

rhymes • Sep 29 '19

I mostly pull from master, checkout a feature branch which could be brand new or ongoing, I push to its origin and rebase it from master if needed.

Before pushing I obviously have to check the diffs, then add things to the staging area and if everything is okay I commit with a message.

Seldom I revert or undo some changes or navigate through the logs.

I also prune local and remote branches regularly.

Finally at the end of the week I take a look at the logs to refresh my memory about what has happened.

This is my flow on DEV's code.

AlbertoM • Sep 28 '19

Most of the time just committing and pushing. Sometimes stash if I started doing something and somebody ask me to fix a bug and what I did was not enough for a commit. Now, with vscode and its good integration with git you don't even have to run the commands but I still do itbecause I don't wanna forget them

edmistond • Sep 29 '19

My typical day is staging, committing, pushing, pulling. All pretty straightforward. Sometimes a bit of rebasing before I push to remote if I want to clean up the history to make it a little more coherent.

It's the atypical days that are more interesting, in all senses of the word. :) I've had rebases from master go horribly, horribly wrong, to the point I had to delve into the reflog to undo the whole process and start over.

Despite being (relatively) comfortable with all of that, I still have to keep looking up the command to check out a remote branch into a new local branch just to make sure I'm not about to do something horrible to my repository.

Murat Bastas • Sep 29 '19

git checkout -b feature/blabla # alias gco -b
git add . # alias  ga .
git commit -m "message" # alias gc -m
git push -u origin feature/blabla # alias gp

and someone merges my branch to master. I'm doing:

git checkout master alias gcom
git fetch --all --prune # alias gfap
git branch --merged | grep -v "\*" | xargs -n 1 git branch -d # alias gdmb

Jacob Herrington (he/him) • Sep 28 '19

I use git constantly. Doing Open Source work a lot and actually having an interest in learning git deeply motivates me to spend a lot of time screwing around with it!

Juan Alejandro Morais • Sep 29 '19

I stick to the mantra of commit small, often. If anything goes wrong, I can easily revert specific changes!

Besides that, I embrace Git Flow and the basic commands including rebase!

Joel Krause • Sep 29 '19

I do this too. Whenever I get to a small “milestone” I push my changes in case I need to go back 👌🏼

Shannon Crabill • Sep 30 '19

In the evenings I like to relax by using git clone on a fresh Flatiron coursework repo.

Arbaoui Mehdi • Sep 28 '19

I'm using Tower on Mac, and the git extension of VSCode, my best days of using git is when I'm only pushing into the master branch on my personal projects.

Mike Lockhart • Sep 29 '19 • Edited

ohshitgit is a browser keyword and shell function to open that page, plus I have a git alias for "fuck-this-noise" which nukes and re-clones the current repo...

Olimpio • Sep 29 '19

Following the git flow and I have git cheat sheet in case I need help, so I avoid having to google the same questions over and over... Which can be time-consuming...

Stephen Chiang • Sep 28 '19 • Edited

Branch, add, commit, push, pr/merge & delete remote, delete local, repeat.

Vicente G. Reyes • Sep 29 '19

git status
git add
git commit -am
git checkout -b new-feature
git push
git pull from the master branfh if I merge my own pull request on GitHub
git merge if therr are conflicts on my merge 😀

emertola • Sep 29 '19

If my colleagues has pushed some changes:

git stash
git pull --rebase
git stash apply

😅😁

Kirill Shestakov • Sep 28 '19

I use VS Code git gui for branching, adding, committing, merge conflicts. I use git command line for rebasing, resetting, looking at logs, reflogs and pushing.

Hesham Abo El-Magd • Oct 2 '19

git rebase

Shubham Battoo • Sep 29 '19

The basic, add commit push, and the rare checkout. A lot of merge. Very less revert.

imad • Oct 1 '19

oh-my-zsh aliases make it easy for me: gcb, gaa, gcmsg, gp

Anthony Bouvier • Sep 30 '19

GitHub Flow for branching.
Jenkins builds most stuff (migrating everything now) and handles deploys.
Peer review PRs or I step in and specifically code review "architected" things.