Why write about git?

I decided to write this post, because, although it's something common for those who already work with software development, I realized that it can generate many doubts in programming beginners.

This article aims to explain the main commands used by git and its features.

Why use git?

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system. It helps developers working on the same project simultaneously and facilitates the continuous software development process.

So, Let's Go!

Download

First you must download git on your computer from the website. It is a very simple process, after downloading it, we are ready to run our first command lines.

How to use?

The git commands can be used by the git bash, terminal or even the integrated vscode terminal.

Setup

To simplify, the blocks between <> will be your data, so you must have already created an account on some source code hosting platforms like GitHub.

First off all, we need to configure the user, email and if we were to work with the node, the npm settings.

git config --global user.name "<username>"
git config --global user.email "<email>"
npm config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/

We can check the settings with the commands:

git config --global user.name
git config --global user.email

Creating a Git project

To create an empty git repository or reinitialize an existing one:

git init

To change the remote upstream:

git remote set-url origin <url>

Clone an existing project:

git clone <url>

After you set up the project

Before we start to modify a code, it's good practice to create a branch, since it will help on our workflow, through the command:

git branch <name of branch>

To change to the branch that we create, its simple, just type:

git checkout <name of branch>

It's possible to create and modify to the branch created with just one command:

git checkout -branch <name of branch>

or the reduced form that I use:

git checkout -b <name of branch>

You can check the branch you are working with the command:

git branch

Once a project is set up correctly and some changes were made to the code, every modification to it will be detected by git, it's possible to see the files changed by the command:

git status

To see the differences in the modified file just type:

git diff

After that, it is necessary to prepare our files to be committed, you can activate them one by one using the command:

git stage <path of file>

Or adding all modified files running this command on the source of project:

git add .

We are almost at the end of the process, it seems like a lot, but I guarantee that with practice these commands will become natural and automatic.

After adding the files via stash or add, just commit them, using this command:

git commit -m "<phrase used in the commit>"

We are almost at the end, the files are already saved on your machine, however to save it in the repository is necessary to run the command:

git push origin <name of the branch>

Well this is the end of the post, I hope it helped you with the git commands that you will use from day to day, of course, if any doubts appears it's always good to check the documentation on the site.

Thanks to everyone!