Github Commands

This post focues on Git configuration and some commands. For complete Git principle and analysis refer to post Git Architecture

Checkout

If you ever modified some files or folders. Then found them inappropriate, you can revert/discard the changes by checkout command.

For example, if you changed the file file.txt, then you can use command:

git checkout -- file.txt

This command will copy the lasted committed "file.txt" from the git repository. The staging area and working tree are also updated.

If you want to discard all the changes:

git checkout -- .

This command is fairly handy when you want to discard several changes across different files.

Clean

git clean [-d] [-f] [-i] [-n] [-q] [-e ] [-x | -X] [--] [path…]

Cleans the working tree by recursively removing files that are not under version control, starting from the current directory.

Normally, only files unknown to Git are removed, but if the -x option is specified, ignored files are also removed. This can, for example, be useful to remove all build products.

If any optional [path…] arguments are given, only those paths are affected.

If you have many untracked or ignored files in your repository, use command:

git clean -ndx [path]

n is to try a dry-run, only shows which files will be cleaned. For real action, remove n argument. d means untracked folders as well. x means don’t use the standard ignore rules read from .gitignore. Therefore, gitignored files won't be ignored by git clean and will be removed. X means removing only files ignored by Git. Option [path] is to only clean a sub-directory of current repository. For example, many ~ trailing files in _post folders:

git clean -idx _post/

i is used for interactive mode which ask you yes or not when cleaning files. To simplify things, replace i with f which will force removing without hints. Most of the time, *~ files are ignored by git, so we need to include x option.

Reference

1. cleaning up untracked files.

Upload local directory as a repository

1. Go to Github web, create a repository. You can init the repository with or without a README.md file, which makes a difference on the procedures below.
2. Go to the local directory for commands
3. git init. Initialize the local directory as a Git repository. This will creat a hiden floder called .git all the git-related stuff will be there.
4. git add . Add the files in your new local repository. This stages them for the first commit.
5. git commit -m 'First commit'. Commits the tracked changes and prepares them to be pushed to a remote repository.
6. git remote add origin <remote repository URL>. The remote repository URL is the https URL of the repository you created in the 1st step.
   • git remote -v Verifies the new remote URL.
7. [optional] If you create the remote repository with a REAMDME.md:
   • git pull origin master to pull the README.md first, otherwise you could not push local directory contents to remote. The git assumes your local copy lags behind of the remote origin.
8. git push origin master. Pushes the changes in your local repository up to the remote repository you specified as the origin.

Reference

1. adding an existing project to github using the comand line

gitignore

gitignore files can ignore files that will not be pushed to remote repository.There are several kinds of gitignore files including .gitignore, .gitignore_global, and .git/info/exclude.

Reference

1. ignoring files
2. gitignore

Reference

1. A very good simple cheatsheet. It is not a good tutorial. But you can refer to it as you forget something.