Get Going with Git – Dan Yavorsky

What’s Git

Git is a free and open source distributed version control system.

This post serves as a set of notes to quickly refer to. For detailed explanations, see these excellent free resources:

On Windows, open the command prompt and type git --version or search for the application Git Bash.
- If you see git version 2.43.0.windows.1 or something similar, you’re good to go.
- If you see git is not recognized as an internal or external command, you need to install Git.
On Mac, open the terminal and type which git or git --version.
- If you see something like /usr/local/bin/git or git version 2.39.3 (Apple Git-145), you’re good to go.
- If you see command not found, you need to install Git.

at the terminal (mac) or command prompt or git bash (Windows)
- type git config --global user.name "your name" (can be your full name or github username)
- type git config --global user.email "your email" (should be the email you use with GitHub)
- check the result with git config --list

pick a username that is short, timeless, professional, and (preferably) all lowercase

Git Credential Manager is the best way to store your GitHub credentials
- on Windows, GCM is included with Git for Windows
- on Mac, you can install GCM via Homebrew with brew install --cask git-credential-manager

To copy down a GitHub repository to your local machine

git clone https://github.com/your-username/your-repo.git to copy down a repository from GitHub to your local machine
git remote --verbose to check the remote was cloned successfully

To add a remote to an existing local repository

git remote add origin https://github.com/your-username/your-repo.git to add a remote to an existing local repository with nickname origin
git remote --verbose to check the remote was added successfully
git remote show origin to see more details about the remote
git remote remove origin or git remote set-url origin _url_ to remove or edit the url aliased by origin

Most common workflow commands

git add newdoc.txt to stage a file for a commit
git commit -m "a commit message" to commit all staged files
git push origin main to push local commits (on branch main) up to the remote repository (origin)
git push -u origin main to push local commits up to the remote repository and have local main track remote main
git pull origin main to pull down the latest changes (on branch main) from the remote repository (origin)

Checking status

Branching

git branch [branch-name] to create a new branch
git checkout [branch-name] to switch to the branch
git checkout -b [branch-name] to create a new branch and switch to it in one command
git checkout main to switch back to the main branch
git merge [branch-name] (when on main) to merge the branch into the main branch

Coming Soon