5 advanced Git commands to power up your projects

If you’re a developer nowadays, odds are you have acquired Git, the edition command process at the heart of contemporary software workflows. You know the fundamental principles — how repositories do the job, how to develop branches and commit improvements, and how to merge people improvements and pull requests.

But now that you know the fundamental principles, it is time to level up a tiny — to take edge of some of the more effective features of Git in your workflow. Right here are 5 superior Git features to make section of your present-day and potential dev efforts.

Simplify commit histories with git rebase

When you have two branches in a task (e.g. a development branch and a master branch), equally of which have improvements that need to be put together, the git merge command is the all-natural and clear-cut way to unify them. A merge provides the improvement record of one branch as a merge commit to the other. Whilst this preserves equally histories in finish depth, it can make the overall record of the task difficult to stick to. In some conditions, you might want a easier and cleaner result. 

The git rebase command also merges two branches, but does it a tiny in a different way. A git rebase rewrites the commit record of one branch so that the other branch is included into it from the stage exactly where it was created. This makes for a a lot less noisy, and more linear, commit record for that branch. But it also suggests that probably beneficial specifics about the other branch and the merge process are removed. 

To that conclusion, rebase is finest utilised when you have many non-public branches that you want to consolidate into a solitary, clean commit record just before merging it with a general public branch. This way, you’re having the whole gain of rebase — earning a commit record more linear and a lot less noisy — devoid of obscuring important specifics about the record of commits to your task.

Clear up merges with git merge --squash

Another way to make merges, and subsequent commits, a lot less noisy is by using the --squash alternative in git merge. --squash requires all the commits from an incoming branch and flattens them into a solitary, consolidated commit.

The splendor of a squashed merge is that you can decide on how to implement the resulting staged documents. You can just commit the whole established of improvements as one, or you can commit a few documents at a time exactly where the improvements are intently related. A squashed merge is also beneficial if the commit record of the incoming branch is beneficial only in the context of that branch, or if it is from a non-public branch that is going to be discarded anyway.

As with a rebase, this method operates finest for committing interior branches to master, but it is also acceptable for pull requests if necessary.