DEV Community

A Git Cheatsheet Of Commands Every Developer Should Use

Ravi Mengar on December 10, 2020

GIT is the most widely used distributed open-source Version Control System that allows you to track and manage changes made to the files locally on...

Read full post

jhtong • Dec 10 '20

Another command I would add is Git Rebase:

git rebase origin/master

Which would apply all the changes in master, below your branch, to make your commits grouped together and more organized.

Also, I use this quite a lot:

git rebase -i HEAD~2

Which runs your rebase in interactive mode for the most recent 2 commits (which is really helpful for squashing and renaming your commits), making it more readable.

EECOLOR • Jan 4 '21

In practice I have noticed more problems arise when using rebase. These problems come up when you work as a team in a branch or have merged other branches (and solved conflicts).

We now have the policy that you are only allowed to rebase if the code has not been pushed to the remote. We also prevent push --force which is required for most rebases.

Ravi Mengar • Dec 10 '20 • Edited

Hey, jhtong

Thanks for letting me know about these commands. Will surely make use of it. Appreciate your help man👍

edwin_ew • Dec 26 '20

nice

Aris Haryanto • Dec 11 '20 • Edited

also you need to add

git stash

when you want to keep your working progress without commit then you need to switch to other branch

and

git stash pop

to put their back to your file

i think this is important if you work with some branch

Lui • Dec 12 '20

I often use git stash save -m "name" instead as I can give the stash a name for easier identification later on

i386net • Dec 13 '20

It's deprecated and it's recommended to use git stash push -m instead

Ravi Mengar • Dec 11 '20

Hey, Aris

Thanks for highlighting the above helpful commands. Will surely make use of it 👍

Benoit de Chezelles • Dec 15 '20

Nice cheatsheet!

For git status you say Files changed in working directory, I think it's wrong, git status gives you the status of the current branch and the files of the whole repo, not just the working directory! For working directory status, you'd do git status .

Also checkout the subcommand git worktree (and its various options), I use it a lot to check something in another branch, review whole branches for a pr of someone else, or other cases. It allows me to have 2+ branches checked out at the same time, sharing the history graph!

Amir Hameed • Dec 13 '20

git am -3 patch.mbox (In case of conflict, resolve the conflict and) git am --resolve

can you elaborate these?

Ravi Mengar • Dec 14 '20 • Edited

Hey Amir,

Here, I've tried to elaborate your question,

git am - Apply a series of patches from a mailbox.
git am -3 patch : By default the command will try to detect the patch format automatically. This option allows the user to bypass the automatic detection and specify the patch format that the patch(es) should be interpreted as. Valid formats are mbox, mboxrd, stgit, stgit-series and hg.
( the -3 will do a three-way merge if there are conflicts )
git am --resolve : When a patch failure occurs, will be printed to the screen before exiting. This overrides the standard message informing you to use --continue or --skip to handle the failure. This is solely for internal use between git rebase and git am.

I hope this will help you !!!

Lui • Dec 12 '20

I often use git branch --merged to identify branches that I can delete as I have already merged them. Same goes for --no-merged to find out if I've forgotten to merge some features.