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6 Git commands every beginner should memorize

Jeremy Schuurmans on November 08, 2019

For people new to Git, it can be confusing and intimidating. If that's you, here are six Git commands for your toolbox. With these, you can become ...

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Kevin • Nov 8 '19

Don't forget about:

git push origin master --force

Eric • Nov 8 '19 • Edited

and

git pull origin master
git reset --hard
git stash
git stash pop

merging into master should be done via pull request imho

Srđan Međo • Nov 8 '19

I appreciate the joke :)

Paulo Renato • Nov 8 '19

You can appreciate the joke as an experienced developer in git, that knows the implications of using it, but we need to be careful when trying to make jokes for the ones that don't get the context of it, specially when the article is targeting beginners.

Jeremy Schuurmans • Nov 9 '19

I thought it was pretty funny myself, but you also make a good point. Thank you for bringing it up!

Srđan Međo • Nov 9 '19

I agree, hence my acknowledgement of the joke for what it is.

Paulo Renato • Nov 8 '19

This is a very bad advice, and should be never used, not even in solo projects, because you get into a bad habit that can have pretty nasty consequences in a professional environment, like Jenkin developers accidentally do "git push --force" to over 150 repos on github.

I don't have the link anymore, but I read a story once of a company that took months to recover from a git push --force to their master branch.

To be on the safe side ALWAYS configure your Github, Gitlab or whatever you use to not accept push to master.

Manda Putra • Nov 10 '19

git push upstream master --force

Cause you are on forked repo

Aurora Skye • Nov 9 '19

Trololololol...

Paulo Renato • Nov 8 '19 • Edited

You forgot the most important of all git checkout -:

╭─exadra37@approov ~/Developer/Approov2/blog/shipfast-on-docker  ‹approov2-new-rebased› 
╰─➤  git checkout -
Switched to branch 'approov2-new'
╭─exadra37@approov ~/Developer/Approov2/blog/shipfast-on-docker  ‹approov2-new› 
╰─➤  git checkout -
Switched to branch 'approov2-new-rebased'

It's just like our old Linux friend cd - ;)

Ok, the above one is more a tip, but a very important command to know about for beginners is git stash --help and git show --help

With git stash we can save our changes that are not commited yet, and if we include -u we will save also the files not tracked. It's useful to clear the workspace or to move code not committed yet to another branch or just to later reuse on the same branch, just by doing git stash apply.

With git show we can see the git diff for the last commit, and with git show <commit-hash> or git show HEAD~3 we see the git diff for that specific point in history.

When things go terrible wrong, like you delete accidentally a branch, you can use git reflog --help to see your history of changes and get back to a good state.