Watch Git Will Finally Make Sense After This for an explanation of how git works. The guide below is for useful commands.

Guide to Git

This guide goes over the most important commands, see a full manual here

Add your GitHub account to PHGameStudio organization

  • Share git username in group chat
  • Confirm entering organization from email message

Setup git CLI

  • Go to GitHub → profile pic → settings → developer settings → personal access tokens → tokens (classic)
  • Generate new token (classic)
  • No expiration date
  • Select scope write: packages

  • Copy token (and save it somewhere if you don’t have clipboard manager)

  • git config --global credential.helper store to store account and password
  • git config --global user.email "email.name@email.com"
  • git config --global user.name "github-username"
  • Clone/push a private repo using https connection and paste token

Important commands

Cloning a repository

  • git clone https://github.com/PHGameStudio/existing-repo.git

Creating a repository

  • git init
  • git add file-1 file-2 dir
  • git branch -m main
  • git commit -am "commit message title" -m "commit message body"
  • git remote add origin https://github.com/PHGameStudio/new-repo.git
  • git push -u origin main

Managing versions

  • git ls-files to list tracked files under the working directory
  • git config --global alias.tree 'log --graph --oneline --all --decorate'
  • git tree to see a version tree

Linear versions

  • Commit hash is the string shown before command message in the tree
    • HEAD can replace hash for representing current version
    • Use HEAD~ for the version before HEAD
  • git checkout <commit-hash> to view a commit (can’t commit without checking out to newest)
  • git checkout <commit-hash> -- . to do an “edit” that restores everything to a commit, can still commit afterwards and the commit will be after the commit before checkout
  • git diff <commit-hash-1> <commit-hash-2> to see files changed between commits (commit-hash-2 is current version (HEAD) if blank)

Nonlinear versions - branches

  • git branch to view name of all branches
  • git checkout branch-name to checkout newest version in a branch
  • git checkout -b feature-branch to create a new branch and switch to it
  • git checkout main, git merge feature to merge branch feature into main
    • Make sure you commit all changes before checking out main
    • Some files may need to be resolved manually
  • git cherry-pick <commit-hash> apply what changed in a specific commit to your current version (also may need manual resolution)
    • *Cherry-pick a range of commits: git cherry-pick <oldest-commit>^..<newest-commit>

Working with remotes

  • git fetch to fetch new commits on the remote, without changing current local version
  • git pull: fetch and merge
    • May require manual conflict resolution, like when merging 2 local branches
  • git push -u origin main: set origin/main as default remote and push local to remote. After this use git push to push to main, and git push origin feature-branch to push to a different branch