Git - My Findings

Learn useful tips and best practices in Git version control system.

👩🏻‍💻 Commit

Squash all git commits into one?

git reset $(git commit-tree HEAD^{tree} -m "Initial commit")

Change commit message of already pushed commit

# prompt you to enter new commit message (of latest commit only)
git commit --amend -m "an updated commit message"

# force push
git push -f

Add more changes to the already pushed commit

# 1. Perform the changes (I know you pushed the commit)

git add .                        # 2. Stag changes

git commit --amend --no-edit     # 3. Amend the commit

git push -f                      # 4. Force push

🎋 Branches

Orphan Branche

There's might be case where you want to start from scratch without any files and commit history. In this case, You can create orphan branch in the repo:

git checkout --orphan <newbranch>
git rm -rf .

Move uncommited changes to new branch

Sometimes we accidentally make changes in the main branch and we want to move those changes to a new branch. In this case, we can create a new branch and move the changes to the new branch.

git checkout -b <new-branch>

🔖 Tags

Remove tag

# Remove local tag
git tag --delete tagname

# Remove remote tag
git push --delete origin <tag-name>

Create & Push tag to remote

git tag -a v1.0.0 -m "v1.0.0"
git push origin v1.0.0

Change tag commit

:::details Why? Checkout this stackoverflow question. :::

# Reassign the same tag to different commit
git tag --force v1.0 <commit-sha>

# Force push the tag
git push --force --tags

This can be useful when you want to push the same codebase to multiple repositories. For example, you have a main repo and you want to push the same codebase to another repo in different organization.

You can also sync Github & GitLab repositories using this method 🤯

# 1. Clone main repo
git clone https://github.com/firstorg/myrepo.git

# 2. Add another remote
git remote set-url --add https://github.com/secondorg/myrepo.git

# 3. Verify the remotes
git remote -v # Output should have two push urls

# 4. Push to both remotes
git push --all # I guess regular git push might work as well

🧮 Misc

Temporarily ignore folder/file in git

You can use the git update-index command with the --skip-worktree option to temporarily ignore changes to a specific folder or file in a Git repository.

git update-index --skip-worktree /temp

To stop ignoring changes to the folder/file (undo above), use --no-skip-worktree option.

git update-index --no-skip-worktree /temp

When you setup a new system you might need to enter your git credentials again and again. To avoid this, you can store your git credentials in the system's credential store.

git config --global user.name "John Doe"
git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

git config --global credential.helper store

From next whenever you enter your credentials, it will be stored in the system's credential store.

Remove git credentials

git config --global --unset credential.helper

Rename git tracked files

Never rename files using mv command or manually. Instead use git mv command to let git know about the rename.

git mv Readme.md README.md

View git ignored & untracked files

# Shows all gitignored files that exist in your working directory
git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard

# Shows only top-level gitignored items
git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard | cut -d'/' -f1 | sort -u

# Shows only top-level files (excludes directories)
git ls-files --others --ignored --exclude-standard | grep -v '/'

FastAPI Best Practices

How to handle file uploads in FastAPI

JD Solanki