Blog

If you’ve ever used Git, or Subversion, or any version control system really, you know there is usually a decent learning curve.  I stumbled acrossthis guide on reddit, and it sums up everything I’ve been trying to teach myself for the past few months quite concisely. I would recommend reading through everything in that article. Maybe even print out some of them to post on your office wall when you start with Git. A couple thing I would add though.

.gitignore

Git ignore is a file which contains patterns of files you want to ignore. When adding files, if git finds that any meet these patterns, they won’t be added. This is a great idea for text editor saves, compiled files, etc. Here’s a couple good things to add in my experience:

nano /path/to/project/.gitignore
----
# Text editor files (check your favorite editor to see what it does
*~
# Compiled Python files
*.pyc
# Compiled C files
*.o
# Sometimes output files of compiled C
*.out
# Leftovers from SVN if you're migrating to Git.
*.svn*
# Some random ones from kernel development, probably not for most people
*.b
*.d
*.asm

That should cover most files that you don’t need in your Git repository. Also remember to not include files that may contain passwords (or use a fake password for development), and usually I leave out database files and instead script the creation of the database with the exact things I need for testing. This also helps when you need to reset your database.

Aliases

Git provides a way to make aliases in your .gitconfig file. That’s all fine and dandy, but that means I have to do it for each and every project. Considering almost every bit of work of useful work gets published in a Git repository, that could get annoying to edit. We could script it, or we could just make the aliases system wide. I’ll go with system wide, since my bash config files are synced to all my workstations, and then I can have 2 letter aliases, rather than “git alias”.

Note: This is a tip for Ubuntu and should work for Debian. YMMV with other Linux OS’s.

nano ~/.bash_aliases
----

alias ga="git add -A --ignore-errors" # Add all files in the current directory recursively
alias gc="git commit -a" # Commit changes, will prompt you for commit message
alias gp="git push origin" # Push changes to the server
alias gb="git branch -a" # Show all branches
alias gr="git reset --hard HEAD" # Throw it all away and start with the last commit

# You could do combined commands to add files, commit, and push to the server
alias gacp="git add -A --ignore-errors && git commit -a && git push origin"

Now when you’re at the command line, type any of the above commands, like “ga” or “gc”, and watch the Git magic happen!

Sensible Git Branching

Finally, this article lists a bunch of best practices when using Git branches, especially for open source projects. The described method is great for developers and great for the users at the same time. It provides release quality branches, beta quality branches, hotfixes, and development branches. This article is simply a must-read if you are using Git.

About Josh Gachnang

Josh Gachnang is a small business consultant with 5 years of experience in developing IT systems. His specialties include moving IT infrastructure to the cloud, standard and mobile web development using Python and Django, and promoting with social media. Git