The first part of this series looked at the inner workings of GIT and showed you how not to be afraid of working with Git.

Now that we understand how Git works, let’s get into the meaty stuff: how to leverage what we know in our projects.

Merge

Merge merges your code.

Remember how we were following good Git practices, having branches for various features we were working on, and not everything on master ? There will come a time when you are done with that feature, and will want to include that in your master . This is where merge comes in. You want to merge your branch into master.

There are 2 kinds of merges:

Fast forward merge

Coming back to our example from last time:

This is as simple as moving the label for master to the-ending . Git has no doubt about exactly what needs to be done — since our “tree” had one single linked list of nodes.

$ git branch master * the-ending $ git checkout master Switched to branch 'master' $ git merge the-ending Updating a39b9fd..b300387 Fast-forward byeworld | 1 + 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+) create mode 100644 byeworld

Non-Fast Forward Merge

This is the kind of merge where Git doesn’t know what to do. There are some changes on the base branch, and some more on the branch we want to merge, thus resulting in the scary merge conflicts!

Here’s the first thing to know about merge conflicts: If you don’t know what’s happening:

git merge --abort

This will bring you back to the original state, with no side effects. You just aborted the mess you were about to make.

Let’s go step by step now into how to resolve merge conflicts.

$ git checkout -b the-middle Switched to a new branch 'the-middle'

In continuing our style, let’s learn via an example. I modify helloworld on branch the-middle .

$ git diff diff --git a/helloworld b/helloworld index a042389..e702052 100644 --- a/helloworld +++ b/helloworld @@ -1 +1,3 @@ hello world! + +Middle World

Add and commit on the-middle .

Then, I switch to master and modify helloworld on master. I add the following:

$ git diff --cached diff --git a/helloworld b/helloworld index a042389..ac7a733 100644 --- a/helloworld +++ b/helloworld @@ -1 +1,3 @@ hello world! + +Master World

Do you see why I had to do git diff --cached here? If not, ask me below!

Now, it’s time to merge!

$ git merge the-middle Auto-merging helloworld CONFLICT (content): Merge conflict in helloworld Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.

When a merge fails, here’s what git does: It modifies the file with the merge to show you exactly what it can’t decide about.

$ cat helloworld hello world!

$ cat helloworld hello world! <<<<<<< HEAD Master World ======= Middle World >>>>>>> the-middle

Does this make sense? The <<<<< HEAD part is ours (the base branch) and the >>>>> the-middle part is theirs (the branch merging into the base branch).

You can simply edit the file to remove the extra stuff added by git, and choose what should go into helloworld finally. There are some tools and editor integrations to make this easier, but I think knowing how it works underneath the hood gives you more confidence when you don’t have your favourite editor lying around.

$ git status On branch master You have unmerged paths. (fix conflicts and run "git commit") (use "git merge --abort" to abort the merge) Unmerged paths: (use "git add <file>..." to mark resolution) both modified: helloworld

I decided to keep both bits.

$ cat helloworld hello world! Master World Middle World

And there you have it:

$ git add helloworld $ git commit -m "resolve merge conflict" [master c747e68] resolve merge conflict

Remotes

Since one power of version source control is to save your code in case of disasters — remotes are here to help. A remote is an externally-hosted copy of your git repository. To be more accurate, a remote is an external repository (not necessarily of the same code you have). By external, it could be in a different folder on your system or in the cloud.

Clone

Clone clones the repository from remote into your current working directory. This is simply creating a copy of the .git/ folder, which gives us the entire history and the files needed to populate the working directory.

git clone <repository-url>

If you haven’t cloned, you probably don’t have a remote. You can create a remote like this:

git remote add <name> <url>

Push and Pull

Push and Pull are actions applied on the remote .

Push pushes your changes to the remote. So, we are sending the Index and corresponding Objects from the object-store!

git push <name of remote> <name of branch>

Pull pulls the code from the remote. Exactly as before, we are copying the Index and corresponding Objects from the object-store!

git pull origin master

origin is the default name of the remote. And since master is the default branch, you can see how the command devolves into the simple name we find everywhere: git pull origin master . Now you know better.

Reset

Reset resets your codebase to a previous version. Reset comes with 3 flags:

--soft , --hard and --mixed .

The beauty of reset , is being able to change history. Say you make a mistake with a commit , and now your git log is all messed up with commits like:

Bugfix

Final BugFix

Final Final BugFix

God why isn't this working last try bug fix

If you want to keep your master history clean, you want to clean up this commit log.

If you’re sending in a Pull Request where there’s no squashing, they’d expect a clean commit history too!

That’s where reset comes in: You could reset all your commits and convert them into one single commit: got sh*t done!

(Please don’t use this as your commit message — follow the best practices!)

Coming back to our example, here’s what I’ve done.

$ git log commit 959781ec78c970d4797c5e938ec154de44d0151b (HEAD -> master) Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Mon Nov 5 07:32:55 2018 +0000 God why isn't this working last final BugFix commit affa90c0db78999d22c326fdbd6c1d5057228822 Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Mon Nov 5 07:32:19 2018 +0000 Final Final BugFix commit 2e9570cffc0a8206132d75c402d68351eda450bd Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Mon Nov 5 07:31:49 2018 +0000 Final BugFix commit 4560fc0ec6305d0b7bcfb4be1901438fd126d6d1 Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Mon Nov 5 07:31:21 2018 +0000 BugFix commit c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae Merge: 3d01508 fb8b2fc Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Tue Oct 23 07:44:09 2018 +0100 resolve merge conflict

Now that the bug is fixed, I want to clean up my history before I push to master . This would work well too — when, say, I realise later on that I introduced another bug and need to revert to the previous version. In this case, c747e689 doesn’t have the best commit message to understand this.

$ git reset c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae $ git log commit c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae (HEAD -> master) Merge: 3d01508 fb8b2fc Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Tue Oct 23 07:44:09 2018 +0100 resolve merge conflict

There, all sorted?

$ git status On branch master Untracked files: (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed) clean.txt nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

clean.txt is the file I had committed for the bug fix. Now, all I have to do is:

$ git add clean.txt $ git commit -m "fix bug: Unable to clean folder" [master d8487ca] fix bug: Unable to clean folder 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+) create mode 100644 clean.txt $ git log commit d8487ca8b9acfa9666bdf2c6b7fa27b3971bd957 (HEAD -> master) Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Mon Nov 5 07:41:41 2018 +0000 fix bug: Unable to clean folder commit c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae Merge: 3d01508 fb8b2fc Author: Neil Kakkar Date: Tue Oct 23 07:44:09 2018 +0100 resolve merge conflict

There, done and dusted. Can you guess now, using the clues from the log , the reset command syntax and your tech-sense to figure out how it works behind the scenes?

Reset cuts off the commit-tree at the specified commit. All labels for that branch — if ahead — are moved back to the specified commit. Do the existing files stay in the object store though? You know how to check that now, Ace.

The files are also removed from the staging area. Now this might be a problem if you have lots of untracked/modified files which you don’t want to add.

How do you do that?

Can you pick up the clue I left in the beginning of this section?

Behaviour flags!

--soft keeps all files staged.

$ git reset --soft c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae $ git status On branch master Changes to be committed: (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage) new file: clean.txt

--mixed is the default: Removes all files from staging area too.

--hard is hard-core. Deletes files from the object store — and directory as well. Use with extreme caution. There goes my bug fix*. Gone.

$ git reset --hard c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae HEAD is now at c747e68 resolve merge conflict $ git status On branch master nothing to commit, working tree clean

*Well, not completely. Git is amazing. Have you heard of meta-meta data? A redundancy log of what happened in the repository? Yes, of course git keeps it!

$ git reflog c747e68 (HEAD -> master) HEAD@{0}: reset: moving to c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae efc6d21 HEAD@{1}: commit: soft reset c747e68 (HEAD -> master) HEAD@{2}: reset: moving to c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae d8487ca HEAD@{3}: commit: fix bug: Unable to clean folder c747e68 (HEAD -> master) HEAD@{4}: reset: moving to c747e6891af419119fd817dc69a2e122084aedae 959781e HEAD@{5}: commit: God why isn't this working last final BugFix affa90c HEAD@{6}: commit: Final Final BugFix 2e9570c HEAD@{7}: commit: Final BugFix 4560fc0 HEAD@{8}: commit: BugFix c747e68 (HEAD -> master) HEAD@{9}: commit (merge): resolve merge conflict 3d01508 HEAD@{10}: commit: add Master World b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{11}: checkout: moving from the-middle to master fb8b2fc (the-middle) HEAD@{12}: commit: add Middle World b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{13}: checkout: moving from master to the-middle b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{14}: checkout: moving from the-middle to master b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{15}: checkout: moving from master to the-middle b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{16}: merge the-ending: Fast-forward a39b9fd HEAD@{17}: checkout: moving from the-ending to master b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{18}: checkout: moving from master to the-ending a39b9fd HEAD@{19}: checkout: moving from the-ending to master b300387 (the-ending) HEAD@{20}: commit: add byeworld a39b9fd HEAD@{21}: checkout: moving from master to the-ending a39b9fd HEAD@{22}: commit (initial): Add helloworld

This is everything from the beginning of the example in the previous article. Does this mean I can recover things if I made an awful mistake?

$ git checkout d8487ca Note: checking out 'd8487ca'. You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You can look around, make experimental changes and commit them, and you can discard any commits you make in this state without impacting any branches by performing another checkout. If you want to create a new branch to retain commits you create, you may do so (now or later) by using -b with the checkout command again. Example: git checkout -b <new-branch-name> HEAD is now at d8487ca... fix bug: Unable to clean folder $ ls byeworld clean.txt helloworld

There you have it.

Congratulations, you’re a Git Ninja — Apprentice now.

Is there something more you’d like to know about? Something that confused you about Git? Let me know below! I’ll try explaining it the way I learnt it!

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