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Git tips and tricks

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John Thomson edited this page Aug 28, 2013 · 10 revisions

This page is a place to collect things we found out how to do in git

Recover from doing work before creating a feature branch

  1. Open git bash window
  2. git stash
  3. Usual process to create feature branch...checkout develop, rebase, start feature
  4. git stash pop

Usually your changes are there. If someone else modified the same files you will need to merge.

Todo: describe that process.

Commit to a gerrit repo without using FW git gui tools

This is helpful if some non-flex repo is using git/gerrit, but the add-ons for git gui are not available.

(As usual, use "git branch feature/Name" to make a branch, git checkout feature/Name to start working on it, make some changes, and stage/commit them--I usually use Git gui for that.)

Finally:

git review develop feature/Name

(Replace feature/Name with the name of your branch, and if necessary "develop" with the name of the branch you are working from.)

There's an even more obscure syntax you can use if you haven't installed the git review extension.

Todo: describe how to install it.

To push for review without the review tool:

git push origin HEAD:refs/for/develop/feature/Name

(Again, replace feature/Name with the name of your branch, and if necessary "develop" with the name of the branch you are working from.)

Recover from committing changes to the wrong branch

You just realized that you committed your changes to develop instead of a feature branch...

git log

Will produce something like

commit 72265073df3c23f860a27b076cf5b085c5a82aef
Author: John Thomson <[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Aug 27 10:44:00 2013 -0500

    LT-14852 Shorten keyboard control labels

You need to copy the SHA code (from the commit line above).

git branch feature/LT-14852

(Makes your feature branch...give it your own name, of course)

git rebase -p --onto feature/LT-14852 72265073df3c23f860a27b076cf5b085c5a82aef^ develop

(Replace feature/LT-14852 with the name of your feature, 72265073df3c23f860a27b076cf5b085c5a82aef with your SHA, and develop with the name of the branch you accidentally committed to...often develop will be right. Keep the "^" character at the end of the SHA.)

git checkout feature/LT-14852

At this point you can go into git gui and amend last commit and make sure everything is right.

Make a local branch "track" a remote one

This is the main way you get a shared branch on your system so you can check it out and work on it.

git someBranch --track branch origin/someBranch

You don't have to use the same name for your local branch but it is much less confusing.

Often you will next want to use "git checkout someBranch" to start working on it

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