GIT COMMANDS I FORGET

I honestly always forget these guys…

Cherry Pick

One of the best git commands ever.

$ git cherry-pick <commit hash>

Be prepared for merge conflicts. Usually easy to sort out though. When done sorting out conflicts, run git add . and git commit. You will create a commit with the same commit name as the commit you are cherry-picking. You can also cherry-pick a range of commits.

$ git cherry-pick <initial_commit_hash>..<terminal_commit_hash>

Note: pay attention to inclusive vs. exclusive of the commits you want to cherry pick. To INCLUDE the first commit in a range, add a carrot at the end before the ... Like this:

git cherry-pick ebe6942^..905e279

Cherry Picking from different repos

This is a bit more advanced. Consider the case where you have two different repos, maybe originally one was a fork of the other or something, you made changes and want to backport the changes to the other repo. Here’s an example

Say you have repo dog-catering-service, and you eventually forked that and built a bigger dog business with more services than just catering. This repo is dog-butler-service and includes all the code from dog-catering-service. You make changes in the dog-butler-service to the catering code, and you want to backport these changes to dog-catering-service.

This is how we do it.

First, check out to dog-catering-service and add a new remote, the dog-butler-service

cd dog-catering-service
git remote add butler git@gitservice.com/dog-butler-service.git
git fetch butler
git remote -v
# origin git@gitservice.com/dog-catering-service
# butler git@gitservice.com/dog-butler-service

Now you have two remotes, origin and butler. Fun fact, origin has no special syntactic meaning in git, it’s just the default name for a remote. Anyways, you have two remotes now, and can cherry-pick from the other remote called butler like this.

git checkout butler/master
git log

You’re now on the butler repo basically, and should see all your commits from your full-blown dog butler service. Locate the changes you want to backport onto your original dog-catering-service repo and get the hash. Now we’re going to do the cherry-picking magic!

git checkout master
git cherry-pick<commit hash you just copied over>

Yea! That’s it. You should be rolling now.

Fucked up your tags?

Remove all local tags and fetch remote tags:

git tag -l | xargs git tag -d
git fetch --tags

Need to delete a remote tag too?

git push --delete origin tagName
git tag -d tagName

Fucked up your remote tags?

Careful. This sucks.

1. Remove all remote tags(!!! WARNING !!!)

   git tag -l | xargs -n 1 git push --delete origin

2. Make remote tags match your local

   git push <remote> --tags

Match Local Branches to Remote Branches

Have a messy repo? First step towards cleaning up is to match all your local branches to the remote repo.

First, fetch and prune

git fetch -p

Next, this thing:

git branch -vv | grep ' gone]' | awk '{print $1}' | xargs git branch -d

Will delete any local branches you have that are not on origin.

RESET A BRANCH TO ORIGIN

Always forget this one smh.

git reset --hard origin/mybranch

DELETE A BRANCH

Somehow I always forget this one. Delete remote branch (careful buddy):

git push <remote_name> --delete <branch_name>

Delete a local branch:

git branch -d branch_name
git branch -D branch_name

The -D one is with force

Save headaches down the road

If you’re working on mac and deploying on linux, sometimes your git history doesn’t actually match your file system. Run this:

git config core.ignorecase false   

Remove a file from history

Sensitive file in your history?

git filter-branch --index-filter "git rm -rf --cached --ignore-unmatch path_to_file" HEAD

Warning: will delete the file from your local FS.

Look at your commits during a given time range

The perfect alibi in a court of law.

git log --after="2020-02-02 00:00" --before="2020-02-08 23:59"

Prioritize a branch during a merge

Problem: You have git conflicts that seem totally unecessary, like it’s not even a conflict. Yet git sees like 70 conflicts when merging. You just want to say, “Hi git, please merge this branch and prioritize my commits when resolving the conflicts. Thx git.”

You can do this using merge strategies

Example 1: mmerge branch sick-hotfix into master, and choose the changes from sick-hotfix if any conflicts are encountered…

git checkout master
git merge -Xtheirs sick-hotfix

Example 2: rebase changes from dev onto cool-feature, and choose the changes from cool-feature if any conflicts are encountered…

git checkout cool-feature
git rebase -Xtheirs dev

NOTE: Xtheirs and Xours are “opposite” when merging vs. rebasing.

Diff commits on two different branches

It also includes either a < or > arrow at the front of each commit indicating whether the commit is on:

• <: left (feature)

• : right (master)

git log --left-right --graph --cherry-pick --oneline feature...master

Empty Commit

Need to trigger CI without actually making a code change?

git commit --allow-empty -m "trigger ci"