Helpful Git Information

As you make your way through the Hands-On-Git section and the Work Time section of Open Hatch, you might find the following handy:

Basic GitHub Terminology

• Fork: button near top right corner of a repository; creates your own copy of the repository that you can edit independently from the original.
• Clone: brings a copy of a repository onto your local machine.
• Pull Request: a way to ask to merge your changes to a repository back into the original; the changes could've occurred in a fork of a repository or in a separate branch of the repository.
• Commit: a special snapshot of your repository; each commit has its own sha (or its one-time-only identification hash)
• Index: the place where you keep all of the files you eventually want to commit.

Basic Git Terminal Commands

• git pull or git pull origin <branch-name>: updates your local version of a repository with the updated version on GitHub; automatically fixes any merge conflicts.
• git fetch: basically git pull without automatic fixing of merge conflicts.
• git clone <url>: brings a copy of a repository on GitHub to your local machine.
• git status: gives you the current status of the files in the repository on your local machine, AKA, what has been added new, deleted, or modified.
• git diff: shows you the changes since your last commit.
• git add <file-name> or git add -A: adds any files that are or are not already being tracked by GitHub to your git index.
• git commit -m "Helpful commit message": tells Git to remember the current state of all of your files; the flag -a is optional, read more about that here.
• git push or git push origin <branch-name>: pushes your local commits onto GitHub.
• git remote -v: see where your local repository is pulling from and pushing to.
• git remote add <name-of-remote> <url-of-remote>: add another remote (really good for when you wish to update your local repository with not only your fork of a repository, but also with what repository you forked yours from).
• git branch: list all local branches in your repository.
• git branch -d: delete a local branch
• git push origin <remote-branch-name>: after deleting locally, run this to delete the branch remotely, too.
• git checkout <branch-name>: switch locally from one branch to another local branch.
• git merge <branch-name>: merges a different branch of your repository into your branch
• git init: create a new local Git repository.
• git config --global user.name "Firstname Lastname": tell Git through your terminal who you are.
• git reset --hard origin/<branch-name>: drop all local changes and commits, and refresh back to what's currently on GitHub.