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My often used Git commands

·3 min read·#misc

Table of contents

  1. Add, Commit and Push
  2. Amending the latest commit message
  3. Amending older commit messages
  4. Renaming a Git branch
  5. Stashing and Cleaning
  6. Get upstream update into your fork repo

1. Add, Commit and Push

The most basic commands that update a repository everytime you push into it.

# Step 1
git add .
# Step 2
git commit # which I prefer because I could add description easily
## OR
git commit -m "refactor: rename a variable"
# Step 3
git push

2. Amending the latest commit message

To amend a message of the latest pushed commit. Ensure you are in the correct repository and branch, which the latest commit belongs to.

# Step 1: Amend the latest pushed commit message
git commit --amend -m "Your new desired commit message"
# Step 2: Force push and update the latest commit message
git push --force branch-name

3. Amending older commit messages

git rebase -i HEAD~5 will help to achieve that. It's not necessarily to be 5, and it could be the 3rd or higher latest commits.

git rebase -i HEAD~10 # 10th or higher latest commits
git rebase -i HEAD~2 # 1st and 2nd latest commits

4. Renaming a Git branch

Ensure you are on the old branch you want to rename.

git checkout old_name

Provide a new name for the old branch.

git branch -m new_name

Push the newly renamed local branch and reset the upstream branch.

git push origin -u new_name

Lastly, delete the old remote branch.

git push origin --delete old_name

5. Stashing and Cleaning

# Before 'git stash', we have to add all changes in the working directory
git add .
# Then, stash the changes
git stash

# To check your stash list
git stash list

# The numbering depends on the index of list.
git stash apply 0

# Drop a stash, and the numbering also depends on the index of list.
git drop 0

# Clear stash list
git stash clear

6. Get upstream update into your fork repo

Once upon a time, I was trying to help a few of my team members to fetch the latest update from the main branch of the remote repository. Then, I figured out it would be best to document it nice and precise for future reference.

git pull https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git BRANCH_NAME

Let's get started

On your terminal, check your local branches git branch -l or all available branches git branch -a.

Now, we have to check out the branch you want to merge to, which is usually your working branch.

git checkout DESIRED_BRANCH_NAME

Now we merge to your current working branch from the upstream repository.

Note: This approach will not disturb your current commit history.

It's important to specify the command explicitly by doing:

git pull https://github.com/ORIGINAL_OWNER/ORIGINAL_REPOSITORY.git BRANCH_NAME

Now your current working branch is up to date with the original repository, aka the upstream repository.

References

Last edited Apr 3, 2021

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