Tips and tricks

git completion

To enable tab-completion of git commands in the shell, consider git-completion.bash. This script enables completion of branch names, tags, remote names, common --long-options, etc.

git log

To decorate the log with branch names and to abbreviate commit hashes to seven characters, use --decorate=full and --abbrev-commit, respectively, or add these options to the git configuration file to enable by default:

git config --global log.abbrevCommit true
git config --global log.decorate full

To summarize one commit per line and show the commit tree:

git log --oneline --graph

To list files that have changed in each commit, along with diff statistics:

git log --stat

To show the detailed changes (patches) in each commit:

git log --patch

git status

To include all the ignored files (from .gitignore rules) in the status output:

git status --ignored

git diff

To highlight white space "errors" in the terminal, use a reverse diff:

git diff -R

To ignore end-of-line white space changes:

git diff --ignore-space-at-eol

To get the commit hash of the most recent common ancestor between two commit refs (hanshes, branch names, etc.):

git merge-base <ref1> <ref2>

This can be combined to view the diff since the current ref branched out:

git diff $(git merge-base <ref1> <ref2>)

git branch

To display detailed information about local and remote branches:

git branch -avv

To delete a branch regardless of uncommitted changes:

git branch -D <branchname>

Note that deleting a branch merely removes the named reference to a particular commit. Hence the commit (and its ancestors) still exists, and can be recovered by a known hash value or from git reflog. In that sense deleting a branch is a rather safe operation. Unreachable commits do get pruned periodically, but there is normally plenty of time to recover unintentional branch deletions.

git clean

To clean untracked files and directories:

git clean --dry-run --force -d`      # without --dry-run flag to remove files

To also remove ignored files, add -x:

git clean --dry-run --force -d -x`   # without --dry-run flag to remove files

To only remove ignored files, add -X:

git clean --dry-run --force -d -X`   # without --dry-run flag to remove files

git clone

Use --single-branch --branch <branchname> to clone a single branch of a repository, for example:

git clone --single-branch --branch develop [email protected]:nrc-cnrc/EGSnrc.git EGSnrc-dev

Further restrict the amount of historical commits to include in the clone with the --depth flag, for example:

git clone --depth=20 --branch develop [email protected]:nrc-cnrc/EGSnrc.git EGSnrc-dev

git pull

When pulling changes on a branch on which you have new local commits, use the --rebase flag to rebase your local commits on the updated tip of the remote branch, for example:

git pull --rebase origin develop