This is going to be one of those posts that is probably useless to everyone else, but valuable enough to me that I’ll read it over and over. These are the Git commands I use most when working with projects on my GitHub, and with Git repos to which I have read-only access.

(Big thanks to Murray K. and Todd L. for hand-holding me through this 🙂 )

For my projects, I use a watered down version of the branching model presented in this article, so that I always have two branches:

• Master: which always represents a release version of a project
• Develop: which represents the progress I’m making toward the next release version

Therefore, for reasons that should be obvious, I always request that collaborators make pull requests only on the Develop branch.

Making changes to Develop

To check out my Develop branch, I do:

git checkout develop

I make whatever changes I want, and then make sure the files I want to include in commits are added with:

git add <filename>

(I only need to do this once per file.)

When I’m ready to commit at least one changed file, I do:

git commit -a

and then add notes about the changes I made.

Then I do:

git push

to push my local version of the Develop repo to GitHub.

Merging Develop into Master

Technically, with the branching model I’m using, I should never commit changes directly to Master. All updates should be put into Develop, and then once Develop represents a version that I think is ready to be released, and all the changes I want are committed to Develop and pushed, I merge Develop into Master with:

git checkout master
git merge develop
git push

Checkout Out Someone Else’s Repo and Submitting A Diff

When checking out someone else’s repo and submitting a diff to them, I do the following:

Do a git checkout of their develop branch with (usually):

git checkout develop
git pull

Then I create my own temporary branch from that with:

git checkout -b develop_branchname

Next, I edit or copy my changes into the branch and commit them with:

git commit -a

If I don’t have write/push access to the repo, I need to create a patch to send to the author with:

git format-patch develop..develop_branchname

After sending the diff, I can delete my temporary branch with:

git checkout develop
git branch -D develop_branchname

Further Reading

• GitHub Cheat Sheet