Rusty Razor Blade » git

Git Tip: Setting Up Your Remote Server

jon — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 19:25:11 +0000

Here’s a pretty common git error message if you’ve added a remote origin server manually.

You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you
want to merge with, and ‘branch.master.merge’ in
your configuration file does not tell me, either. Please
specify which branch you want to use on the command line and
try again (e.g. ‘git pull ‘).
See git-pull(1) for details.

Well, fortunately it’s pretty easy to fix. Edit your .git/config, adding the remote and merge lines under your master branch.
[branch "master"] remote = origin merge = refs/heads/master

Next time you’re on the master branch and pull, it’ll fetch the latest code off the master branch on the origin and merge into your local master.

Git – What Changed Between Pushes?

jon — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 21:53:07 +0000

There’s an overwhelming amount of git tools, and if you’re coming from SVN you might expect that the tools w/ the same names work the same way. You’d be wrong.

Because of Git’s distributed nature, you can (and frequently do) have commits in your repo that you might not have pushed up. You might also have forgotten what they were. Good thing there’s a tool to check that.

Lets assume you’re on your master branch, and you’re comparing against the origin remote repo.

git whatchanged -p origin/master..HEAD

That’ll give you a nice text diff of everything you’re about to push. Awesome, right?

Remove File From Git History

jon — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:55:43 +0000

Useful stuff.

git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git update-index --remove filename' HEAD
git push --force --verbose --dry-run
git push --force

Slight better version. Only rewrites history from the first commit the file existed.

git filter-branch -f --index-filter 'git update-index --remove filename' ..HEAD
git push --force --verbose --dry-run
git push --force

Found on github.

Setting up a remote git repository

jon — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:49:10 +0000

Here’s a great guide for setting up a new remote git repo. Thank you, Tool Man Tim.

Switching from SVN to git

jon — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 23:54:50 +0000

I’ve been using SVN for several years now, so I’ve been partial to it, and reluctant to switch to another form of source control. I’m very comfortable with it, and I’ve got dozens of scripts to augment it and help me deal with it’s shortcomings, as well as a few blog posts.

Easier to create a repository from existing code.

This is the first thing I noticed about git that absolutely crushes subversion. With subversion, you have a repository that you check files out of. With git, you can literally create the repo while you’re in a directory.

git init

The above line creates a new repository for you in your current directory. Everything in there is now under version control. It’s awesome. So simple and elegant.

Git stash is really, really cool.

It’s nice to see that other people encounter the same problems I do when using SVN. I’d be working on something, need to switch to a different branch, but I don’t want to commit my work. It’s not done, and I didn’t create a branch to start. Yes, I should have, but I thought it would be less than an hours work, and SVN’s merging kind of blows. So I didn’t.

Use git stash when you want to record the current state of the working directory and the index, but want to go back to a clean working directory. The command saves your local modifications away and reverts the working directory to match the HEAD commit.

Yes, there are ways around this in SVN, but it’s still a pain to merge in changes when I’m done. Merging in your temporary stash is simple:

git stash apply

On my first day using git, I had already used this feature. Very handy.

I finally understand why I’d want the entire log on my machine.

I’ve always worked out of an office where my repo was on a gigabit line and was sitting nearby. I also was usually SSH’ed into the machine so I could just do the commands remotely and see the output. However, I’m doing some work over a VPN, and using SVN is incredibly slow and annoying. It’s also over http only, so I’ve lost my sweet file:///. Git absolutely crushes SVN here.

The git client supports SVN.

It’s nice that I don’t need to migrate everything over right away. I like making commits that aren’t shared with everyone right away, since I might do a lot of work that I consider valuable, but doesn’t end up compiling or working at all. I realize I could branch here, but I’m not always on top of things. This ties into the stash mentioned above.