I have heard a lot of chatter on blogs and twitter about how people just don’t get git. They exclaim it is too hard to learn, too hard to work with, doesn’t make sense, and on and on… To put this bluntly, I think they are just complaining for the sake of complaining, or at the very least they never bothered to learn how to use git. So as a remedy to this, I am publishing the only 6 git commands that you really need to know to get yourself started for a project where you are the sole-developer.
git init
Used to initialize the current directory as your local repository for your projects source control.
git init
git remote
Sets the remote, or online, repository that you want to commit your local repository to.
git remote add origin {{git-url}}
git add
Used to add files to be committed. To add a single file do this:
git add {{filename}}
Or to add all the files in the current directory and all subdirectories, do this:
git add .
git commit
Used to commit the current changes to your local repository.
git commit -am "your message about what changed and why"
git status
Used to show the differences between what has been committed and the current directory.
git status
git push
Used to push your local repository, or in other words your committed changes, to your online repository such as GitHub.
git push
Does the same thing as the above.
git push origin
Does the same thing as above assuming you are in the master branch, which is default for new Git repositories.
git push origin master
Bring in all together
Now lets bring all these commands together as an example of how they might be used in a simplistic, but real world situation.
git init
touch README
{{ Add Some Test To Your README File }}
git add README
git commit -am "adding the readme file to my project."
git status
git remote add origin [email protected]:managedfusion/coderjournal.git
git push origin master
Hope this helps you get started with Git. If you are interested in some of the more advanced ways of working with Git there is an excellent tutorial put together by GitHub at http://learn.github.com/. Also don’t forget to setup your .gitignore file. Happy coding.