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!
By the end of this lesson, you should be able to do the following:
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:
git clone git@github.com:USER-NAME/REPOSITORY-NAME.git
or
git clone https://github.com/user-name/repository-name.git
git push origin main
git add .
git commit -m "A message describing what you have done to make this snapshot different"
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"
; andgit status
is read as git | status | (no destination)
.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. Therefore, we have a project coming right after this lesson where we’ll walk you through the entire Git workflow, which is the exact same process you would use in a real project.
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.
This section contains helpful links to other content. It isn’t required, so consider it supplemental for if you need to dive deeper into something.
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, clicking the small arrow to the left of the question will reveal the answers.
git clone git@github.com:<your-github-username>/<your-respository-name>
to clone a GitHub repository onto your local machine.git status
to see any changes made since your last commit.git add
to track files.git commit
to commit tracked files.git log
to view your commit history.git push
to send your commit to GitHub.add
and commit
. The combination of these two commands gives you control of exactly what you want to be remembered in your snapshot.add
as adjusting the number of people or elements to be included in a photo. With Git, you can select the changes you want to save with git add
. Imagine a project that contains multiple files where changes have been made to several files. You want to save some of the changes you have made and leave some other changes to continue working on them.commit
as actually taking a photo, resulting in a snapshot. For example, to commit a file named README.md, type git commit -m "Add README.md"
. The -m
flag stands for "message" and must always be followed by a commit message inside quotation marks. In this example, the commit message was "Add README.md"
.origin
is in git push origin main
.origin
is a placeholder name for the URL of the remote repository. Git sets up the origin by default when it clones a remote repository. You can use origin
to access the remote repository without having to enter a full URL every time. This also means that you can have multiple remotes for a repository by giving each a unique name.main
is in git push origin main
.main
is the branch of the remote repository you want to push your changes to. We will get more into branches in a later lesson, but the main thing to remember is that main
is the official branch in your projects where production-ready code lives.5-6 months
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