Git Basics

Introduction

In this lesson, we’ll cover common Git commands used to manage your projects and to upload your work onto GitHub. We refer to these commands as the basic Git workflow. When you’re using Git, these are the commands that you’ll use 70-80% of the time, so if you can get these down, you’ll be more than halfway done mastering Git!

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:

  • How to create a repository on GitHub
  • How to get files to and from GitHub
  • How to take “snapshots” of your code

Assignment

Before you start!

  • Recent changes to the way Github names the default branch means you need to make sure you are using a recent version of git (2.28 or later). You can check your version by running: git --version
  • If you haven’t already, set your local default git branch to main. You can do so by running: git config --global init.defaultBranch main
  • For more information on the change from master to main see GitHub’s Renaming Repository.

Create the Repository

  1. You should have already created a GitHub account in the Setting up Git lesson. If you haven’t done that yet, you can sign up here.

  2. Create a new repository by clicking the button shown in the screenshot below.

  3. Give your repository the name “git_test” in the repository name input field, check “Add a README file”, and create the repository by clicking the green “Create repository” button at the bottom of the page.

  4. This will redirect you to your new repository on GitHub. To get ready to copy (clone) this repository onto your local machine, click the green “Code” button, select the SSH option and copy the line below to it.

  5. In the command line on your local machine, let’s make a new directory for all your Odin projects. Create a directory called repos with the mkdir command in your root folder. If you’re not sure you’re in your root folder, just type cd ~. Once it’s made, move into it with the cd command.

  6. Now it’s time to clone your repository from GitHub onto your computer with git clone followed by the URL you copied in the last step. The full command should look similar to git clone git@github.com:USER-NAME/REPOSITORY-NAME.git.

  7. That’s it! You have successfully connected the repository you created on GitHub to your local machine. To test this, you can cd into the new git_test folder that was downloaded and then enter git remote -v in your command line. This will display the URL of the repository you created in GitHub, which is the remote for your local copy. You may have also noticed the word origin at the start of the git remote -v output, which is the name of your remote connection. The name “origin” is both the default and the convention for the remote repository, but it could have just as easily been named “party-parrot” or “dancing-banana”. (Don’t worry about the details of origin for now; it will come up again near the end of this tutorial.)

Use the Git Workflow

  1. Create a new file in the git_test folder called “hello_world.txt” with the command touch hello_world.txt.

  2. Type git status in your terminal. In the output, notice that your hello_world.txt file is shown in red, which means that this file is not staged.

  3. Type git add hello_world.txt. This command adds your hello_world.txt file to the staging area in Git. The staging area is part of the two-step process for making a commit in Git. Think of the staging area like a “waiting room” for your changes until you commit them. Now, type git status again. In the output, notice that your file is now shown in green, which means that this file is now in the staging area.

  4. Type git commit -m "Add hello_world.txt" and then type git status once more. The output should now say: “nothing to commit, working tree clean”, indicating your changes have been committed. Don’t worry if you get a message that says “upstream is gone”, this is totally normal and only showing because your cloned repository currently has no branches. It will be resolved once you have followed the rest of the steps in this project.

    “Your branch is ahead of ‘origin/main’ by 1 commit” this message just means that you now have newer screenshots than what is on your remote repository. You will be uploading your snapshots further down in this lesson.

  5. Type git log and look at the output. You should see an entry for your “Add hello_world.txt” commit. You will also see details on the author who made the commit and the date and time for when the commit was made. If your terminal is stuck in a screen with (END) at the bottom, just press “q” to escape. You can configure settings for this later, but don’t worry about it too much for now.

Modify a file or two

  1. Open README.md in your text editor of choice. In this example, we will open the directory in Visual Studio Code.

  2. Add “Hello Odin!” to line 3 of README.md and save the file with “Ctrl+S” (or “Command+S” on Mac).

  3. Back in your terminal (or in the fancy built-in terminal in Visual Studio Code with Ctrl + ` ), type git status and notice that README.md is now shown as not staged or committed.

  4. Add README.md to the staging area with git add README.md.

  5. Can you guess what git status will output now? README.md will be displayed in green text. That means README.md has been added to the staging area. The file hello_world.txt will not show up because it has not been modified since it was committed.

  6. Open hello_world.txt, add some text to it, save and stage it. You can use git add . to add all files in the current directory and all subsequent directories to the staging area. Then, type git status once more, and everything should now be in the staging area.

  7. Finally, let’s commit all of the files that are in the staging area and add a descriptive commit message. git commit -m "Edit README.MD and hello_world.txt". Then, type git status once again, which will output “nothing to commit”.

    As an added bonus to this section, if you are using Visual Studio Code (and you should be if you’re following this curriculum) and you don’t want to get stuck accidentally writing a commit message in Vim, this command will make Visual Studio Code open a new tab with the ability to write your commit message and a description below it: git config --global core.editor "code --wait". Once you are done with your commit message, save and exit the tab.

  8. Take one last look at your commit history by typing git log. You should now see three entries.

Push Your Work to GitHub

Finally, let’s upload your work to the GitHub repository you created at the start of this tutorial.

  1. Type git push. If you want to be more specific, you can type git push origin main, but since you are not dealing with another branch (other than main) or a different remote (as mentioned above), you can leave it as git push to save a few keystrokes.

  2. Type git status one final time. It should output “Your branch is up to date with ‘origin/main’. nothing to commit, working tree clean”.

  3. When you reload the repository on GitHub, you should see the README.md and hello_world.txt files that you just pushed there from your local machine.

Cheatsheet

This is a reference list of the most commonly used Git commands. (You might consider bookmarking this handy page.) Try to familiarize yourself with the commands so that you can eventually remember them all:

  • Commands related to a remote repository:
    • git clone git@github.com:USER-NAME/REPOSITORY-NAME.git
    • git push or git push origin main (Both accomplish the same goal in this context)
  • Commands related to workflow:
    • git add .
    • git commit -m "A message describing what you have done to make this snapshot different"
  • Commands related to checking status or log history
    • git status
    • git log

The basic Git syntax is program | action | destination.

For example,

  • git add . is read as git | add | ., where the period represents everything in the current directory;
  • git commit -m "message" is read as git | commit -m | "message"; and
  • git status is read as git | status | (no destination).

Git Best Practices

There’s a lot to learn about using Git, but it is worth taking the time to highlight some best practices so that you can be a better collaborator. Git is not only helpful when collaborating with others, but is helpful when working independently as you will be relying on your own commit history in the future when revisiting old code.

Two helpful best practices to consider are atomic commits and leveraging those atomic commits to make your commit messages more useful to future collaborators.

An atomic commit is a commit that includes changes related to only one feature or task of your program. There are two main reasons to do this: first, if something you change turns out to cause some problems, it is easy to revert the specific change without losing other changes; and second, it enables you to write better commit messages.

As for writing better commit messages, this Chris Beams article on How to Write a Git Commit Message provides excellent guidelines for writing neat and concise commit messages.

Conclusion

You may not feel completely comfortable with Git at this point, which is normal. It’s a skill that you will get more comfortable with as you use it.

The main thing to take away from this lesson is the basic workflow. The commands you’ve learned here are the ones you will be using the most often with Git.

Don’t worry if you don’t know all the commands yet or if they aren’t quite sticking in your memory yet. They will soon be seared into your brain as you use them over and over in future Odin projects.

In later Git lessons, we will cover some of the more advanced Git features, such as branches, which will further expand your abilities and make you more productive.

For now, concentrate on using the basics of Git that you’ve learned here with all of your projects from now on. You will soon know each of the basic Git commands from memory!

Knowledge Check

This section contains questions for you to check your understanding of this lesson. If you’re having trouble answering the questions below on your own, review the material above to find the answer.

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