Advanced Git

Advance your understanding of how Git works under the hood, master workflows, branching, merging and rebasing your work for easy and successful project collaboration! By Chris Belanger & Jawwad Ahmad.

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Who is this for?

This book is for anyone who would like to leverage the power of version control with Git in their software development process.

Covered concepts

How Git actually works
Rebasing
Workflows in Git

Master Git!

Chances are if you’re involved with software development you’ve heard of and have used Git at some point in your life. Version control systems are critical for any successful collaborative software project. Git is both simple to start using and accommodating for the most complex tasks with version...

Before You Begin

This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book, and more.

What You Need

Book Source Code & Forums

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Dedications

About the Team

Introduction

Section I: Advanced Git

This section dives into the inner workings of Git, what particular Git operations actually do, and will walk you through some interesting problem-solving scenarios when Git gets cranky. You’ll build up some mental models to understand what’s going on when Git complains about things to help you solve similar issues on your own in the future.

How Does Git Actually Work?

If you've been using Git for a while, you might be wondering how it actually works. Discover how Git is built on top of a simple key-value store-based file system, and what power this provides to you.

Merge Conflicts

Merging isn't always as simple as it might first appear. In this chapter you will learn how to handle merge conflicts — which occur when Git cannot work out how to automatically combine changes.

Stashes

Git stashes offer a great way for you to create a temporary snapshot of what you're working on, without having to create a full-blown commit. Discover when that might be useful, and how to go about it.

Demystifying Rebasing

Rebasing is poorly understood, although it can be an incredibly powerful tool. In this chapter, we’ll cover what happens behind the scenes when you rebase and set you up for some useful applications of rebasing in the coming chapters.

Rebasing to Rewrite History

Rebase is a whole lot more powerful than just as a replacement for merge. It offers the ability to completely rewrite the history of your git repo.

Gitignore After the Fact

Gitignore is easy right? If you've been using it for a while you'll know that isn't always true. Discover how you can fix problems with gitignore such as handling files that have been accidentally committed to the repository.

The Many Faces of Undo

One of the common questions associated with Git is "how can I get out of this mess?" In this chapter you'll learn about the different "undo" commands that Git provides — what they are and when to use them.

Section II: Git Workflows

Now that you understand how Git works and how to use some of the advanced features, you need to learn how to incorporate Git into your software development lifecycle. There are established best practices and several formal Git workflows out there.

Those formal Git workflows, well, they’re all good, and in some cases, they’re all bad. It depends what you want to accomplish in your repo, and how your own team works. GitFlow is one of the most popular branching strategies, but there are alternative models that work well in many situations. This section will introduce you to these workflows and branching models, and explain what problems they solve and what problems they create.

Centralized Workflow

This model means you work in the main branch all the time. Although this might seem terrifying, it actually works rather well for small teams with infrequent commits.

Feature Branch Workflow

Feature branches are used to create new features in your code and then merged to main when they’re done.

Gitflow Workflow

A popular method to manage your team’s development workflow. In fact, there are even plugins for IDEs that support this Git workflow.

Forking Workflow

The forking workflow is used when you’d like to contribute to open-source repositories that you don’t have direct push access to.

Conclusion