Git Distributed Version Control

Git is a distributed version control system currently maintained by Junio C. Hamano. You can find valuable information

• at the official ​Git homepage
• in the ​Git Book
• in the comprehensive ​Git Reference Manual

General Git Workflow

For in-depth information on how to use various aspects of Git, please consult the excellent ​Git book and the comprehensive ​manual. The very first thing you should do, is to setup your personal information as this is associated with all the commits you are about to produce. So simply add this with:

$ git config --global user.name "Your Name Here"
$ git config --global user.email "Your E-Mail Here"

To checkout a project, there are two options depending on the overall accessibility of the projects' repository. If the project is publicly available, you can checkout anonymously with

$ git checkout http://ufo.kit.edu/git/repo-path

if the project is private you need to have your public SSH key be associated with the repository. If this is the case, you can checkout a project via SSH with

$ git checkout git@ufo.kit.edu:repo-path

Pulling remote changes

Now, you have the complete projects' history and can start to build the project or develop contributions. In any case, you want to regularly keep up with the changes made by others, so if you haven't touched the code, you can simply pull in changes with

$ git pull

Commit changes locally

To record changes, you need to stage the change by adding the affected files with

$ git add FILE [FILE ...]

and commit the staged changes with

$ git commit

Note that this two-step process easily allows you to organize your commits in a logical way by staging only relevant changes. If you are sure that all changes are relevant to a certain commit you can by-pass this and simply call

$ git commit -a

In any case you will be presented with an editor to insert a summary line and a detailed commit message.

Branches

Branching with Git is cheap and should be used at all times. The main branch is called master and should be left untouched for most of the time. To branch off of it, simply type

$ git branch new-branch-name

and change to the new branch with

$ git checkout new-branch-name

You can now develop independently of the main branch that you should synchronize regularly as shown above. If you want to merge the changes in your branch either use

$ git merge master

to pull in changes and intermingle them with yours. If you want to have your changes always be together, you can replay the changes on top of the master branch with

$ git rebase master

however, you should never publish a branch that has been rebased, otherwise people pulling from you will get in trouble.

Push changes remotely

Depending on the access rights to the repository you can push your changes back to the server with

$ git push

However, in some cases you won't have write rights to the master branch. You have several options here. First you can generate patches with

$ git format-patch master..new-branch-name

and send them to the maintainer. You can also put your changes on a server that is accessible to the maintainer and tell him the location. He can setup a remote branch and merge the changes himself. If you have an associated public key and the maintainer asked to have personal branches, you can push your changes with

$ git push origin new-branch-name:/dev/user-name/new-branch-name

The branch name in front of the colon is your local branch name, the one after is the remote branch name containing the path where you can store changes. If you want to delete the remote branch, you push an empty branch to the same location

$ git push origin :/dev/user-name/new-branch-name

Creating a New Repository

If you have a project that you want to have version controlled with Git open a new ticket with the Infrastructure component and add the following information:

• Repository name (very short)
• Repository description
• Maintainer
• Should people from outside be able to see it on ​http://ufo.kit.edu/repos?
• Should other developers be able to push to personal branches?
• Public keys and user names for all people that you want to have
  • write rights to master
  • read rights
  • write/read rights to certain branches

When the repository has been created and your project is already version controlled with Git locally, just register the repository URL as the new origin

$ git remote add origin git@ufo.kit.edu:repo-name
$ git push

otherwise create a local Git repository

$ git init .

and commit all files

$ git add 
$ git commit

and register the repository URL.

Best Practices and Tips

Commit Message

Never, ever exceed the 50-character limit of the commit message summary in the first line! If you keep it short and concise, browsing through the logs becomes much more easier. More detailed information about the commit can and should be presented in the commit messages' body that has a 80-character-per-line limitation. In any case, you should setup your editor to respect these limitations.

Aliases

Aliases save you a lot of time if used properly. See for example ​this blog entry.