Git
Git is a version control system designed to be used in a distributed ecosystem and primarily interfaced in a terminal (i.e. git(1)).
Compare to CVS.
Contents
Installation
All Linux distributions offer a git package. Most BSD distributions do as well.
On Windows, see the Git for Windows project.
Usage
To begin tracking a directory, run git init. This creates a .git folder to maintain the internal state of the version control system.
Use git status to show the current state in a human-readable format.
Branches
For more information about using branches, see here.
Submodules
To clone a repository that uses submodules, try:
git clone --recurse-submodules [email protected]:example/example.git
Alternatively, submodules can be pulled in a separate step.
git clone [email protected]:example/example.git cd example git submodule update --init --recursive
To add a submodule, try:
git submodule add [email protected]:example/subexample
To delete a submodule, try:
git submodule deinit subexample
Patches
To create a patch, try:
git format-patch -1 HEAD
Generally, the HEAD can be omitted.
This creates a patch file that can be applied like:
git apply 0001-Commit-Message-Here.patch
To create a patchset of the last 3 commits, try:
git format-patch -2
This will create a series of patches that are named sequentially like 0001-Commit-1.patch, 0002-Commit-2.patch, and so on.
Note that applying a patch with git apply simply changes local files. It does not create a local commit. Compare to git am, which is meant for applying patches as commits, including metadata embedded into the patchset (i.e., creator, date, etc.).
To create a squashed patch, try:
# Assumes that local work is in a development branch # Create a temporary branch to house a squashed commit from the development branch git checkout -b temporary-branch git merge --squash development-branch git commit -a -m "Squashed Commit Message" # Create a patch against the main branch (usually either `master` or `main`) git format-patch main # Finally return to main branch delete the temporary branch git checkout main git branch -d temporary-branch
Troubleshooting
Fatal error when cloning a remote repository
If git fails to clone a remote repository, possibly with one of the following error messages:
fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output ... fatal: early EOF fatal: index-pack failed
Then try a shallow clone first:
git clone --depth 1 https://example.com/repo.git git fetch --unshallow git pull --all