Git Tutorial for Beginners: Learn Git in 1 Hour

In this course, you're going to learn everything you need to know to get started with Git. If you're an absolute beginner or if you have been using git for a while but never really understood how git works this tutorial is for you you're going to learn all the fundamental concepts as well as the essential commands that you need to know these are the commands that you would use every day at work so by the end of this tutorial you will have a good grasp of the basics and you'll be ready to learn more about the intermediate to advanced concepts i'm adani and i'm super excited to be your instructor if you're new here be sure to subscribe as i upload new tutorials every week now let's jump in and get started so what is git and why is it so popular git is the most popular version control system in the world a version control system records the changes made to our code over time in a special database called repository we can look at our project history and see who has made what changes when and why and if we screw something up we can easily revert our project back to an earlier state without a version control system we'll have to constantly store copies of the entire project in various folders this is very slow and doesn't scale at all especially if multiple people have to work on the same project you would have to constantly toss around the latest code via email or some other mechanisms and then manually merge the changes so in a nutshell with a version control system we can track our project history and work together now version control systems fall into two categories centralized and distributed in a centralized system all team members connect to a central server to get the latest copy of the code and to share their changes with others subversion and microsoft team foundation server are examples of centralized version control systems the problem with the centralized architecture is the single point of failure if the server goes offline we cannot collaborate or save snapshots of our project so we have to wait until the server comes back online in distributed systems we don't have these problems every team member has a copy of the project with its history on their machine so we can save snapshots of our project locally on our machine if the central server is offline we can synchronize our work directly with others git and mercurial are examples of distributed version control systems out of all these git is the most popular version control system in the world because it's free open source super fast and scalable operations like branching and merging are slow and painful in other version control systems like subversion or tfs but they're very fast and git we'll talk about this later so git is almost everywhere more than 90 of software projects in the world use get that's why almost every job description for software developer mentions git so if you're looking for a job as a software developer git is one of the skills you must have on your resume you should know it inside out you should know how it works and how to use it to track your project history and collaborate with others effectively and that's exactly what you're going to learn in this course let's talk about various ways to use git we can use git on the command line so we open a terminal or command prompt window to execute git commands this is the fastest and sometimes the easiest way to get the job done that's why a lot of people use the command line now if you don't like the command line well you're in luck because most modern code editors on ides have built-in support for basic git features for example in vs code we have this source control panel which gives us the essential git features there are also extensions available for bringing additional git features for vs code the most popular extension is gitlands it brings a ton of git features in vs code there are also graphical user interfaces specifically made for using git here on the git website you can find the complete list of these tools for different platforms we have tools for windows mac linux android and ios out of all these the two most popular tools are git kraken and sourcetree git kraken is my personal favorite gui tool for git it's beautifully designed it works across different platforms and it integrates with other git cracking products such as get cracking boards for issue tracking and git cracking timelines for project management it's free for open source projects but for commercial projects you have to pay an annual fee just to let you know i'm not an affiliate of git cracking i'm just a fan the other option is sourcetree it's completely free but it's only available for windows and mac so if you're a linux user you have to use git kraken or another gui tool in this course we'll be spending most of our time on the command line for a couple of reasons the first reason is that pretty much all of these gui tools have some limitations they support the git commands that people use most of the time so even if you want to use a gui tool there are times you would have to roll up your sleeves and get back to the command line to get the job done the other reason is that the command line is always available but there are situations where a gui tool may not be available to you you might connect to a server remotely and you may not have permission to install a gui tool if you don't know how to use the command line then you're stuck in practice a lot of people including myself use both the command line and a gui tool and that's what i'm going to show you in this course there are times that it really makes sense to use a gui tool and not the command line but there are other times that using the command line is faster and easier so we'll use the command line at the end of the day you should use the right tool for the job don't be like this guy you probably know him our popular superstar developer called john smith he thinks he's better than everyone else because he does everything in the command line he never uses a gui tool and he looks down at people who do well let him think whatever he wants if that's what makes him happy who cares so we'll be spending most of our time on the command line but when it makes sense to use a gui tool i'll be showing you examples in vs code and git kraken because those are the most popular tools now if you have never worked with a command line before don't worry i'm going to hold your hand and teach you everything step by step it's a lot easier than you think so next we're going to install git all right let's see if you have git on your machine or not and if yes what version you have installed to do this you have to open a terminal or a command prompt window if you're on mac press command and space and then type terminal if you're on windows click the search icon on the bottom navigation bar and type cmd so here's my terminal or console window your terminal window might look different it doesn't matter this is where we're going to execute git commands so let's look at the version of git on this machine we type git dash dash version so in this machine i'm using git version 2.19.2 but the latest version at the time of recording this video is 2.27.0 so i highly encourage you to download and install the latest version just head over to git scm.com download over here you can find instructions for installing git on different operating systems it's really easy you're not going to have any problems now if you're on windows once you install git you're going to get this application called git bash which is short for born again shell this is basically a command prompt window like this one over here but it emulates unix or linux environments so throughout this course i encourage you to use git bash instead of the built-in command prompt window so what you see on the screen looks closer to what i'm going to show you in this course so go ahead and install git in the next lesson i'm going to show you how to customize our git environment the first time we use git we have to specify a few configuration settings we have to specify our name email default editor and how it should handle line endings we can specify this configuration settings at three different levels at the very top we have the system level the settings that we have here apply to all users of the current computer below this level we have the global level the settings here apply to all repositories of the current user and below this level we have the local level the settings here apply to the current repository or the repository in the current folder so we can have different settings for different repositories or different projects so here in the terminal window we type git config then we type dash dash global to specify the level at which we are defining these settings next we should specify the setting we want to configure so user that name here we type double quotes and type our name now the reason we're adding double quotes is because we have a space in this value okay so that was the first setting once again git config dash global this time we're going to set user.email now because we don't have a space in emails here we don't need double quotes so let's add our email all right next fill it to specify our default editor if you don't set this on mac by default git is going to use vim which is a scary editor a lot of people are freaked out by it in this course i'm going to use visual studio code or vs code you can use any editor that you prefer but if you want to follow along with me i highly encourage you to download the latest version of visual studio code from code.visualstudio.com now on this mission i've added visual studio code to my path so i can open it from any folder on my machine without specifying the full path so if i type code here's vs code if this doesn't work on your machine you have to troubleshoot the issue yourself depending on your operating system there are different instructions for adding vs code to your path so back to the terminal let's set the default editor git config global the setting we want to configure is core that editor once again we need double quotes because here we're going to have a space the value for this setting is code space dash dash weight with the weight flag we tell the terminal window to wait until we close the new vs code instance okay so let's go ahead now all these configuration settings are stored in a text file we can edit that file using our default editor in this case vs code so we can type git config dash dash global dash e this will open our default editor to edit all the global settings let me show you so all right here's our configuration file you can see the full path to this file on the top the name of this file is git config now in this file we have different sections so we have the user section with two settings name and email we have the core section with these two settings and so on now back in the terminal window you can see the terminal is waiting for us to close vs code so as close as we know now we're back in the terminal and we can execute the next command next we're going to configure how git should handle end of lines this is a very important setting that a lot of people miss so on windows end of lines are marked with two special characters carriers return and line feed on mac and linux systems end of lines are indicated with line feed so that means if we don't handle end of lines properly we're going to run into some weird issues down the road to prevent this we have to configure a property called core.autocrlf which is short for carriage return line fit so let me walk you through a real scenario let's say we have two people here john and julie working with the same repository john uses a windows machine julie uses a mac as i told you on windows end of lines are marked with carriage return and line feed so when john wants to check in his code into the repository get to remove the carriage return character from end of lines similarly when he checks out his code from the repository get should update end of lines and add the carriage return character to achieve this behavior we should set this property to true on the other hand when julie checks out the code she doesn't want the carrier's return character so git shouldn't touch end of lines however if carrie's return is accidentally added to end of lines perhaps because of the editor that julie is using git should remove it when storing the code in the repository to achieve this behavior we should set this property to input which means it should only modify end of lines when storing code in the repository so back in the terminal we type git config dash dash global core dot auto crlf if you're on windows you should set this to true if you're on mac or linux you should set this to input let me show you a few different ways to get help about git commands let's say you want to learn more about the config command you can simply google git config on this page you can see the full documentation of this command you can see various options and how they work we can also access the same page on the terminal window we simply type git config dash dash help this is exactly the same information you saw a second ago here we can press space to go to the next page and queue to exit now if you don't need a full blown help you just need a quick refresher you can type git config dash h this gives us a short summary of this command and its options so we're done with the introductory stuff starting from the next section we're going to cover a lot of git commands now below this video we can download a pdf of all the commands we're going to cover in this course if you're starting out don't worry too much about memorizing these commands instead try to understand how they work as you practice getting the rail board all these commands are going to become second nature to you trust me so download the cheat sheet below this video and then i will see you in the next section the first thing you need to know to use git effectively is how to take snapshots of your project which is what we're going to talk about in this section we'll be talking about the fundamental concepts and git that are often misunderstood so make sure to watch every lesson in this section even if you think you know the basics a lot of people use the basic git commands without having a proper understanding of how git works and that's why they constantly get stuck so watch every lesson in this section now let's jump in and get started alright the first thing we're going to do is create a directory for our project you can call this directory anything and put it anywhere on your machine it doesn't matter i'm currently in the projects directory so let's create a directory called moon and then go into this directory so let's imagine this is our project directory and here we can have tens or hundreds of files the first time we want to add this file to a git repository we have to initialize a new empty repository so we type get init look at this message initialized empty git repository in and here's the full path so we have the moon directory and inside this directory we have a sub directory called dot git by default this subdirectory is hidden because you you're not supposed to touch it so if we type ls to list all the files and directories here we don't see anything but if we type ls-a which is short for all we can see the git subdirectory if you're on mac you can open this with finder and if you're on windows you can open it with windows explorer or file explorer i'm not sure what it's called these days so let's open dot get take a look so here's our git directory or git repository this is where git stores information about our project history so we have directories like branches hooks info objects and references now as someone using git you don't really need to understand this structure this is purely implementation detail it's how git stores information it's not of our business that's why this directory is hidden so you don't touch it if you crop or remove this directory you're going to lose your project history let me show you so back in the terminal look at this green marker it says git that means we have a git repository in this directory now if you want to have a pretty colorful terminal window like this on mac you need to install zh or z shell and on windows you need to install poshkit but don't worry about it now these tools are completely optional to use git it's just for making things pretty so here we have a git repository now if i remove the git sub directory we're going to lose this repository so rm dash rf dot get look the green marker is gone we don't have a git repository here anymore so don't touch this directory now once again let's initialize a git repository beautiful so now that we have a repository next we're going to talk about the basic git workflow now that we have a git repository let's talk about the basic git workflow what we do on a daily basis when using git so here's our project directory and here's our git repository which is actually a hidden sub directory in our project directory now every day as part of working on various tasks we modify one or more fans when our project reaches a state we want to record we commit those changes into our repository creating a commit is like taking a snapshot of our project now in git we have a special area or a special intermediate step that doesn't exist in most other version control systems it's called the staging area or the index it's essentially what we're proposing for the next commit or the next snapshot so when we're done making changes we add the modified files to the staging area or index review our changes and if everything is good then we'll make a commit the proposed snapshot will get permanently stored in our repository so the staging area allows us to review our work before recording a snapshot if some of the changes shouldn't be recorded as part of the next snapshot we can unstage them and commit them as part of another snapshot that's the basic git workflow now let me walk you through a real example this example is crucial so pay close attention all the way to the end even if you think you know the basics our project directory is currently empty so we add a couple of files here now we are ready to record this state so we use the add command to add these files to the staging area now these files are in the staging area this is the state we're proposing for the next commit we review these files everything is good so we use the commit command to permanently store this snapshot in the repository as part of this we supply a meaningful message to indicate what the snapshot represents this is essential for having a useful history so as we fix bugs implement new features and refactor our code we make commit and each commit clearly explains the state of the project at that point in time so now we have one commit in our repository now a common misconception about git is that once we commit the changes the staging area becomes empty this is not correct and i think this is why a lot of people find git confusing so what we currently have in the staging area is the same snapshot that we stored in the repository so this staging area is actually very similar to a staging environment we use when releasing software to production it's either a reflection of what we currently have in production or the next version that's going to go in production so let's continue with our example let's say as part of fixing a bug we make some changes to file one note that what we currently have in the staging area is the old version of file one because we haven't staged the changes yet so once again we use the add command to stage the changes now what we have in the staging area is the same content we have in our working directory so let's make a commit to record this date now we have two commits in our repository also look at the commit message it's describing the bug that we just fixed now let's say we realize that we no longer need file to it contains unused code so we delete it from our working directory but this file is still in the staging area so once again we should use the add command to stage this change in this case the deletion this is the interesting part even though we're saying add file to it knows that file 2 is actually deleted so it will delete this file from the staging area or the next snapshot again we make a commit to permanently record this date now we have three commits in our repository each commit contains a unique identifier that gets generated by git it's like a revision number each comment also contains information about what was changed by who when as well as a complete snapshot of our project at the time it was created so unlike many other version control systems git doesn't store the deltas or what was changed it stores the full content with this it can quickly restore the project to an earlier snapshot without having to compute the changes now you might ask but hey mosh when storing the full content in every snapshot waste a lot of space no because git is very efficient in data storage it compresses file contents and doesn't store duplicate content now someone using git you don't really need to know how it stores data that's implementation detail and may even change in the future what you need to know is that each commit contains a complete snapshot of our project and this allows us to quickly get back to a previous state so that's the basic idea over the next few lessons you're going to see this workflow in action let's start by adding a couple of files to our project to do that we're going to use the echo command this is not a git command it's just a standard unix or linux command for writing content to a file so here we're going to write hello to file1.txt so here i'm working with a text file because i don't want this course to be specific to people who know a particular programming language like python or javascript what i'm going to show you in terms of the workflow applies to any programming languages okay so we write hello to file1.txt good now let's execute this command one more time and change file 1 to file 2. so now we have two files in our project now look at this question mark here that means we have new files here that are not tracked by git because the first time you initialize a git repository in a directory git is not going to automatically track your files so if you have a thousand files in your project you have to instruct it to track them okay so here we're gonna run git status to see the status of the working directory and the staging area take a look so we don't have any commands yet we have untracked files which are file one and file two they're indicated by red because they are not in the staging area yet to add these files to the staging area we use the git add command here we can list a single file like file one the txt or multiple files separated by a space we can also use patterns so star.txt that means all the files with the txt extension we also have period which adds the entire directory recursively now you have to be a little bit careful with this because sometimes there are files you don't want to add to your repository perhaps large files like large binary files or log files you don't want to add this faster repository because they increase the size of your repository i will show you how to ignore these files later in this section so just remember add period adds the entire directory recursively in this demo i'm going to go with this command because we only have two files in this directory okay now our green indicator changed to yellow which means we have stuff in the staging area that are ready to be committed so if we run git status again look we have two new files and they're indicated by green which means they're in the staging area now let me show you something interesting i'm gonna modify file one so once again we're gonna use the echo command to echo world but here instead of one greater than sign i'm gonna use two greater than science which means append so we're going to append world to file one the txt now let's run git status again look what happened we have two files in the staging area because they're indicated by green but we also have one modified file in our working directory so you might be asking but hey marsh didn't we already add file 1 to staging area yes we did but when we ran the add command git took a snapshot of file 1 and added that snapshot to the staging area so here's the current situation in the staging area we have the first version of file one we changed this file after we added it to the staging area so what we currently have in our working directory is the second version of this file it has some changes that are not staged yet so back to the terminal we run git add period or git add file one the txt one more time now look at the status of our working directory both these files are in the staging area and we don't have any unstaged changes so next i'm going to show you how to commit this snapshot to permanently store it in our git repository now we have a snapshot in the staging area ready to be permanently stored in our repository so we type git commit dash m for message and here in double quotes we type a short description that identifies what this snapshot represents so here i'm going to say initial commit now there are times that a short one-liner description is not sufficient you want to explain some details to give context for example if you worked on a bug and there were some constraints at the time you committed your code you may want to explain those constraints this is very valuable to both you and your co-workers so in situations like this we drop the message we just type get commit now when we press enter this opens our default editor in this case vs code because at the beginning of the course i configured my default editor to be vs code okay so here we're trying to edit this file commit underline edit message which is stored in our git sub directory so on the top we can type a short description ideally this should be less than 80 characters then we add a line break and after that we can type a long description now these lines that start with the pound sign are comments they're going to get ignored so we type whatever one here in this case i'm going to say initial commit and this is our first comment of course this is repetitive we don't have commit messages like this but for this demo i'm going to go with this message so we save the changes then we close this window back in the terminal our snapshot is committed and here we have basic statistics about what was changed so two files were changed which are file one and file two and we have three insertions three lines were inserted in file one we inserted two lines hello world and in file two we inserted one line now look at this indicator it turned green because our working directory is now clean it doesn't have any new changes so what we have in our working directory is exactly the same content we have in our staging area which is exactly the same content we have in the last commit let's talk about the best practices for committing code first of all your comments shouldn't be too big or too small we don't want to make a commit every time we update a file that's just useless because we'll end up with comments like update file one update file to object five three it's just useless on the other hand we don't want our comments to be too big we don't wanna wait and implement a feature end to end before committing it we don't want to code for three days and then make it commit because the whole point of committing is to record checkpoints as we go so if you screw up we can always go back and recover our code so try to commit often in the real world you might commit five to ten times a day or even more depending on the kind of work you are doing but this is just a basic guideline don't take it as a rule don't try to aim for five or ten commits a day so as you're coding as you reach a state you wanna record then make a commit also each commit should represent a logically separate change set so don't mix things up for example if you're fixing a bug and then you accidentally find a type on your app you shouldn't commit both these changes in one commit you should have two separate commits one commit for the typo another one for the bug fix now if you accidentally stage both these changes you can easily unstage them i will show you how to do this later in this section next you should give yourself the habit of creating meaningful commit messages because all of these messages are going to show up in history so if your messages are cryptic they're not going to be helpful to you or other team members now if you followed my previous advice if your commit represents a single unit of work it would be easier to come up with a message for your commit if you're doing too many things in one commit you're not going to come up with a good message okay now in terms of the wording most people prefer to use the present tense in their commit messages so instead of fix the bug you should say fix the bug if you don't like this convention that's totally fine but whatever convention you use make sure that you and other team members stick to it so always take these best practices in mind when committing code hey guys mosh here i just wanted to let you know that this video you've been watching is actually the first hour of my complete get mastery course and covers only the basic stuff so after you finish this video if you want to learn more take a look at my full course the complete course is 5 hours long and covers intermediate to advanced level concept it comes with a certificate of completion downloadable summary notes and a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you're not happy you can ask for a refund you will learn all about browsing history branching and merging collaborating with others using git and github and rewriting history so by the end of this course you would be able to use git like a pro and work effectively with others in your team if you're interested click on the link below this video to enroll one of the common questions a lot of beginners have is do we always have to stage our changes before committing them well the answer is no and in this video i'm going to show you how to skip the staging area but do this only if you know what you're doing if you're 100 sure that your code your changes don't need to be reviewed because that's the whole point of having a staging area so let's modify file 1 and then commit it in one step we're gonna say echo test to file one.txt once again we're appending this line to file1.txt okay all right now we have a yellow indicator because our working directory is dirty so instead of running git add and then committing it in two steps we're going to commit here we're going to supply the option dash a which means all that means all modified files and then just like before we supply a message or we can combine these two options so let's supply a message fix the bug that prevented the users from signing up let's go our code is committed one file was changed and we have one insertion so this is how we can skip the staging area but once again do this only if you know what you're doing 99 of the time you should always stage your code before committing it to the repository let's say that we just discovered that we no longer need file 2 in our project because it contains unused code so to remove this file we type rm file2.txt again this is not a git command because it doesn't start with git it's just a standard unix command okay so let's go with this now we have a yellow indicator which means our working directory is dirty so let's run git status we have one change that is not staged for commit so we remove file 2 from our working directory but still exists in the staging area let me prove it to you so we type get ls files these are the files in our staging area so file2 is still here even though we removed it from our working directory so as i told you before every time we make changes we have to stage those changes using the add command so here we type git add file to txt to stage this change or this deletion more accurately now let's run git ls files one more time so file two is no longer in the staging area beautiful let's run git status we have one change that is ready to be committed and as you can see it's indicated by green which means it's in the staging area so let's commit this change and here we're going to say remove unused code so to remove a file we have to remove it from both our working directory as well as the staging area because this is a very common operation git gives us a command that does both of these steps in one go let me show you so we type get rm so instead of using the standard rm command in unix we use git rm here we list a file name like file2.txt we can also specify multiple files we can also use patterns like all text files when we execute this command git removes this file from both the working directory as well as the staging area now let's talk about renaming or moving fast so currently we have a single file in our working directory and that is file1.txt let's rename this to main.js so we use the move command in unix to rename file1.txt domain.js so with this command we can rename or move files and directories okay now our working directory is dirty so let's run git status we have two changes and both these changes are unstaged because they're indicated by red we have a delete operation we deleted 51. txt and under untracked files we have a new file so as you saw at the beginning of this section git doesn't automatically track all your new files every time you have a new file in your project you have to add it to the staging area so git starts tracking it so once again we have to use the add command to stage both these changes git add file1.txt this is for staging the deletion and now let's add the new untracked file main.js now let's run git status one more time look git recognized that we renamed file1.txt to main.js and this item is indicated by green which means this is in the staging area so renaming or moving files is a two-step operation first we have to modify our working directory and then we have to stage two types of changes an addition and a deletion so similar to removing files git gives us a special command for renaming or moving files that is git move so instead of using the standard move command in unix we're going to use git move now let's rename main.js to file1.js and then run git status one more time so we have a rename operation for renaming file on the txt the file on the js so when we use the move command the changes are applied to both the working directory and the staging area now let's commit the changes for the message i'm going to say refactor code now look at the statistics one file was changed we have zero insertions because we haven't added any new lines to any of our files and we also have zero deletions because we haven't removed any lines from any files in almost every project we should tell git to ignore certain files and directories for example we don't want to include log files or binary files that get generated as a result of compiling our code adding these files is just going to increase the size of our repository without providing any values every developer can have their own log files right so log files are not something we want to share and synchronize with other team members so for this demo let's create a directory called logs and then add a log file here once again we can use the echo command to write hello to logs dev.log now let's run git status so git is saying that we have an untracked directory called logs but we don't want to add this to the staging area because we don't want git to track this so to prevent this we have to create a special file called dot git ignore so this file has no name it only has an extension and it should be in the root of your project so let's echo logs forward slash to dot git ignore now i'm going to open this file using vs code so code git ignore so in this file we have a single entry logs forward slash which indicates a directory we can list as many files and directory as we want here for example we can include main.log we can also use patterns like all log files and so on once we are done we save the changes back in the terminal now if you run git status one more time git no longer says that we have a new directory called logs because it's ignoring it instead it says we have a new file called dot get ignore so let's add this file to the staging area and then commit our code so add git ignore so this is how we can ignore files and directories in git just remember this only works if you haven't already included a file or a directory in your repository in other words if you accidentally include a file in your repository and then later added to git ignore git is not going to ignore that let me show you so let's create a new directory called bin let's imagine that this directory contains our compiled source code so using the echo command i'm going to write hello to bin app.bin now let's run git status so we have a new directory now we want to accidentally commit this to our repository so we add all the changes and then commit our code add bin here's the problem every time we compile our code git is going to say that this file bin app.bin is changed so we have to stage it and then commit it it doesn't make sense why do we have to commit this file every time we compile our application so back to git ignore let's add the bin directory here as well now back in the terminal let's run git status so we have modified git ignore beautiful list stage and commit this change so git add period and then git commit include in slash and git ignore now in this case git is not going to ignore the changes in this directory because it's already tracking this directory so let's modify our bin file by saying echo hello world to bin slash app.bin git status look git is saying that this file is modified this is not what we want to solve this problem we have to remove this file from the staging area which is what we're proposing for the next commit so earlier we talked about get ls files this command shows the files in our staging area so as you can see this bin file or the bin directory is already in the staging area we should remove it here how well earlier we talked about the git remove command i told you that with this command we can remove a file or a directory from both the working directory as well as the staging area but in this case we don't want to remove this file from our working directory because that's how we launch our application so we want to remove this file only from the staging area how well let's add dash h for a quick help so we type git rm then we can add zero or more options now here we have this option called dash dash cache with this we can remove stuff only from the index index is the old term for the staging area so when you look at git documentation most of the time you see index so using this option we can remove the bin directory from the index so git rm dash dash cached bin forward slash now we get an error saying not removing bin recursively without dash r so one more time let's look at the help for this command we have another option called dash r for recursive removal so we want to remove the entire bin directory from the staging area to do that we type git rm dash dash cache dash r bin forward slash beautiful now this entire directory is removed from the staging area let's verify it so get ls files our bin directory is no longer here now let's run git status look we have one change that is ready to be committed this directory is deleted from our staging area so let's commit the change remove the bin directory that was accidentally committed okay from this point forward git is no longer going to track the changes in this directory so if we encode test to bin slash app.bin you can see our working directory is still clean we don't have any changes we can verify it using git status as well so this is how we can ignore files and directories in git now if you head over to github.com github get ignore you can see various git ignore templates for different programming languages for example let's look at the template for java so for java projects it's a great idea to exclude all the class files because these files get automatically generated when you compile your code so there is no need to include them in your repository so here we have various patterns like all the class files or all the log files the lines that start with a high sign these are comments so they get ignored by git so you have learned how to get the status of the working directory and the staging area using the status command the output of this command is very comprehensive but it's also very wordy so as an alternative we can supply the short status flag or dash s let me walk you through a few examples so for this demo we're going to modify one of our existing files and then add a new file so echo sky 2 file 1.js so we're appending a sky to 51.js now let's create a new file so once again echo sky to file to the js now let's run git status we have modified file one and we have a new on-track file so as you can see the output of this command is very comprehensive but also very wordy now let's run git status dash s this is much easier to dice so let me show you how this works here we have two columns the left column represents the staging area and the right column represents the working directory so we have modified file one and that's why we have a red m in the right column which is the working directory so we have some changes here but these changes are not in the staging area that's why we don't have anything in the left column now file two is a new file that's why we have two question marks in both these columns now let's add file one to the staging area so github file 1 and then do another short status look for file 1 we have a green m in the left column or the staging area column so all the changes that we had in the working area are now in the staging area in the right column we don't have anything we don't have any extra changes now earlier in this section i told you that when we stage a file git takes a snapshot of that file and puts it in the staging area so if you modify that file after we have to restage the changes let me show you this one more time so i'm going to modify file one one more time let's echo ocean to fileone.js and then run git status dash s look what we have here so in the left column we have a green l which means we have some changes in the staging area but we have some additional changes in the working directory that are not added to the staging area okay so let's add file one to the staging area one more time and then run git status dash s now all the changes that we had in the working directory are now in the staging area so we're done with file one let's look at file two so i'm gonna add file two to the staging area as well and then run git status dash s for file two we have a green a in the left column which represents added so file two is added and file one is modified this is how the short status output works so we have staged a couple of changes now before committing what we have in the staging area we need to review our code because we don't want to commit bad code or broken code to our repository so as a best practice always review what you have in the staging area before making a commit now the status command only shows the files that have been affected but how can we see the exact lines of code that we have staged we use the diff command so we type get div dash dash staged to see what we have in the staging area that is going in the next commit so let's take a look here now quite frankly comparing files using the terminal window is not really the best way to do this quite often we use visual tools and i'm going to talk about that in the next video but i think it's essential for you to understand the output of this command because there are times that you may not have access to a visual tool or at this you may go to an interview and you may get asked what is the output of this command so you need to be able to explain it so on the top you can see that the diff utility was called with these arguments so we are comparing a slash file1.js with b file1.js so we're comparing two copies of the same file the first copy is the old copy which is what we have in the last commit and the second copy which is the newer copy is what we currently have in the staging area okay now below that we have index whatever this is just some metadata it doesn't really matter after that we have a legend so changes in the old copy are indicated by a minus sign and changes in the new copy are indicated by a plus sign after that we have this section this is a header with some information about what parts of our file has changed so currently our files are very short they have only a few lines of text but in the real world your file might have hundreds of lines of code if you change only a couple of lines git is not gonna show the entire file it's gonna divide that file into chunks and what we have here is just a single chunk so every chunk has a header with some information that gives you context so let's see what we have here we have two segments the first segment is prefix with a minus sign so this gives us information about the old copy what we have in the last snapshot the second segment is prefixed with a plus sign so this contains information about the new copy which is what we have in the staging area so in the old copy starting from line one three lines have been extracted and shown here in the new copy once again starting from the first line five lines have been extracted and shown here so these are all these lines over here now you can see that these two lines are prefixed with a plus sign so these are the lines that we have added in the new copy so we have added these lines in the staging area they're green which means they're new lines so pretty straightforward now after that we have another call to the diff utility this time we're comparing two copies of file two now in this case look at the legend we don't have an old copy because this is an entirely new file so in the last commit we didn't have a file called file2 that is why in this header we have 0 comma 0 which means starting from line 0 0 lines have been extracted because there is no old copy of this file okay now what if you want to see the changes in our working directory that are not staged yet to do that we run git div without any arguments so this compares what we have in the working directory with what we have in the staging area take a look there is no output here because we have staged all the changes in our working directory we can also verify this using our short status command so all the changes in our working directory are now in the staging area so for this demo i'm going to make a change to file 1. so let's open it with vs code or our favorite editor so i'm going to change the first line to hello world save now let's run another short status so for file 1 we have some changes in our working directory that are not in the staging area let's look at these changes using the dev command so git diff without any arguments take a look so here we're comparing two copies of file one the old copy is what we currently have in the staging area and the new copy is what we have in the working directory now take a look in the old copy which is indicated by a minus sign we have this line hello which is removed because it's red and in the new copy which is what we have in the working directory we have this new line hello world so to recap if we run git diff without any argument we can see unstate changes and if we pass dash dash staged we can see this state changes that are going to go in the next commit in the next lesson i'm going to show you how to use a visual tool to easily compare files as i told you in the last lesson quite often we use visual div tools for comparing files there's so many visual div tools out there the most popular ones are kdiff and p4 merge which are cross platform and win merge that runs only on windows in this lesson i'm going to show you how to use vs code for comparing files if you want to use a different tool or a different editor you have to look up the instructions yourself so here in the terminal first we have to tell git that we want to use vs code as our default devtool so we have to set two configuration settings so once again we type git config dash global so the global settings apply to all of our repositories okay now the setting we're going to set is diff dot tool we're going to set that to vs code so with this command we're just giving a name in this case vs code to our default div tool next we have to tell git how to launch vs code so once again git config dash global here we set div tool dot vs code dot cmd we set this to double quotes because we're going to have a space now on my machine i've added code to my path so i can run it from any directories if this doesn't work on your machine you have to look up the instructions yourself depending on your operating system so we're going to launch code with a few arguments the first one is dash dash wait this tells the terminal window to wait until we're done with vs code so until we have compared the changes and close the vs code instance the second argument is dash div this tells vs code that we want to use it for diffing or comparing files then we have two more arguments dollar sign local in capital and dollar sign remote and capital these are placeholders for the old and new copies of a file okay so let's set that now let's make sure that you've got this step right so we're gonna run git config dash dash global e as i told you at the beginning of the course with this command we can edit our global configuration settings in our default editor which is vs code so take a look so all these things are stored in this file dot git config which is stored in this directory so we have the user section which we said earlier in the course now here's a diff section that we just set in this section we have set the tool to vs code this is just a name then we have diff tool vs code and here's the command that should be run for comparing files with vs code so we have code with dash weight then dash diff now those two placeholders that i added for some reason they're lost so let's add them real quick dollar sign local and dollar sign remote make sure to get this right otherwise things are not going to work on your machine now we're done so let's close this window back in the terminal instead of using the div command we're going to use div tool this will launch our visual div tool for comparing files now if we don't still play any arguments we're going to see our on state changes so this will compare what we have in the working directory with what we have in the staging area if you want to look at our state changes we supply dash dash stage exactly the same way we use the diff command okay so let's look at the changes we have in our working directory we have modified only a single file that is why we have one out of one and that is file1.js so git is asking if you want to launch vs code which is the name that we assigned to our default div tool let's go ahead take a look so here's the old copy which is what we have in the staging area and here's a new copy which is what we have in the working directory as you can see we can easily tell that this line has been replaced with this line it's much easier to see the changes now the terminal window is waiting for us to close the vs code instance so let's close this window back to the terminal now let's look at the state changes so get div tool dash dash staged two files have been affected in the staging area the first one is file1.js let's look at the changes all right in this case the old copy is what we have in the last command and the new copy is what we have in the staging area so these are the changes that are going to go in the next commit you can easily tell that we have added two lines here now let's close this tab back in the terminal git is asking if you want to look at the changes in file2.js in this case i'm going to ignore that so no like quite honestly we don't use diff tools so much these days i just covered it because i want my course to be comprehensive these days most editors and ids allow us to view the staged and unstate changes as part of our development environment i will show you how to do this later in this section we have made a few commits so far but where are these commits let me show you so we use the lock command to look at our history take a look so here are all the commits we have created sorted from the latest to the earliest so here's our last commit on top each commit has a unique identifier this is a 40 character hexadecimal string that git automatically generates for us you can think of it like a revision number but unlike a revision number it doesn't increase it's just a unique identifier okay now next to that we have head pointing to master what is this well we're going to talk about this a lot in the future but master is the main branch or the main line of work in git in some other version control systems it's called trunk and git we can have multiple branches so we can work on multiple features or multiple bug fixes in parallel and then combine our code we'll talk about that later in the course now head is a reference to the current branch so this is how git knows what branch we're currently working on again we're going to talk about this a lot in the future now for each commit you can see the author the name of the author as well as their email the date and time the commit was created as well as the one-line description like here we have multiple commits that are spread across multiple pages we can press space to go to the next page and again now to quit we can press q now the log command has a few interesting options one of them is one line this shows us a short summary of the commit so here we have the unique identifier that is shortened to seven characters and we only have the one line description so we don't have the author as well as the date and time of each commit we have another option for reversing the sort order let me show you so git log one line and then we add dash dash reverse now you can see the first command be on top and here's the last commit now the law command is very powerful so in the future we're going to talk a lot about it in fact we have a complete section on browsing history i'm going to show you various ways to get reports from the history for now let's just stick to the basics so viewing the list of commits is great but what if you want to see what exactly we have changed in a given commit that's when we use the show command for example let's say we want to look at the content of this commit over here we type git show now here we need to specify the commit we want to inspect there are two ways to reference the commit we can reference it using its unique identifier so we type d601b 90. now we don't have to type all the seven characters we can type fewer characters as long as we don't have another commit whose id starts with these characters so that's one way to reference a commit another way is to use the head pointer so look head is currently in front of the last commit so to view the last commit we can type head or to look at previous commit we can type a tilde and then specify how many steps we want to go back so if we type one we start from head which is here we go one step back and this references this command over here let's take a look so on the top we can see the author and the date of this commit as well as its message below that we have a diff of what has changed so in this commit we have changed a single file that is git ignore over here we can see that we removed this line and added these two lines so this is very useful now what if we don't want to see the differences we want to see the final version the exact version that is stored in this commit well we bring down the last command git show head tilde one then we type a colon and here we specify the full path to a file for example we can say dot git ignore or if this file is in a subdirectory we type for example bin slash app.bin okay now let's look at git ignore so this is the exact version stored in this commit now earlier i told you that each commit contains a complete snapshot of a working directory not just changes but when we run the show command we only see the differences but it's changed what if you want to see all the files and directories in a commit well for that we're going to use a different command that's called ls tree now why is this called a tree well a tree is a data structure for representing hierarchical information so in a tree we can have nodes and these nodes can have children now a directory on the file system can be represented using a tree because each directory can have children these children can be files and other subdirectories if you want to learn more about this concept you should take my data structures course so lst means list all the files in a tree now here we specify the comments we are interested in head tilde one and now look these are all the files and directories stored in this commit so we have git ignore right before that we have a unique identifier that is generated based on the content of this file so in git's database we have an object with this id below that we have bin again it has a unique identifier that is generated based on the content of this directory now look at the type of this object it's a tree so files are represented using blobs and directories are represented using trees all of these are objects that are stored in git's database using the show command we can easily view an object in git's database for example if we type git show and then specify this unique identifier or we can type only the few characters as long as there is no ambiguity so here's the content of our git ignore file as another example let's look at this object this tree the bin directory so git show 64629 here we have a tree in this tree we have this file app.bin so using the show command we can view an object in git's database these objects can be commits blobs which represent files and trees which represent directories as well as tags we'll talk about tags in the future so i told you that you should always review the stuff that you have in the staging area before making a commit so let's say we reviewed these changes and we realized that the changes in file one shouldn't go in the next commit perhaps because these changes are logically part of a different task so we don't want to have a commit that represents changes for different tasks right so in this case we want to undo the add operation because earlier we use the add command to add file 1 to the staging area now we want to undo this operation how do we do this well in the past we used the reset command but a lot of people found this command confusing especially with options such as hard or soft that's why we have a new command called restore now make sure you're using the latest version of git otherwise what i'm going to show you is not going to work on your machine so here i'm using git version 2.28 and with this we can easily restore files in different environments in working directory or in staging area so git restore we want to restore file 1 in the staging area so we type dash dash staged and then we specify the file name we can list multiple files here we can also use patterns or if you want to restore everything in the staging area we simply use a period so here i'm going to restore file1.js now when we run git status again you're not going to see a green m here because all the changes that we had in the staging area are now in the working directory take a look so git status dash s look we no longer have any changes for file one in the staging area all the changes are in the working directory now it's essential for you to understand how the restore command works the restore command essentially takes the copy from the next environment so in case of the staging environment what is the next environment the last commit what we have in the repository so when we restored file one in the staging area git took the last copy of this file from the last snapshot and put it in the staging area that is what happened now look at file two file two is a new file because here we have a green a which is short for added so we have this file we have this new file in the staging area but this file doesn't exist in the last commit so what do you think will happen when i restore this file well because we don't have a copy of this file in our repository or in our last commit git is going to remove this file from the staging area and take it back to its previous state which is a new on-track file let me show you so git restore dash staged file2.js now let's run git status again so file2 is a new untracked file because we have two question marks there are times that we have some code in our working directory that we want to throw away let's say we made some changes but we didn't like those changes so we want to scratch everything and start over we can discard the local changes using the restore command so here we have some local changes in file1.js to undo these changes we type git restore file1.js when we execute this command git is going to take the version of this file in the next environment which is our staging environment it's going to take that version and copy into our working directory we can also use a period here and this will undo all the local changes now let me show you something so the command is executed now let's run another short status but file two is still here why is that well this is a new on tracked file so git hasn't been tracking this so when we tell git to restore this file git doesn't know where to get a previous version of this file it doesn't exist in our staging environment or in our repository so to remove all these new untracked files we have to type get clean now take a look by default we get this fatal error saying require force defaults to true and neither of these switches were given so basically git is telling us that hey this is a dangerous operation if you accidentally remove these ontrack files there is no way you can recover them so let's run git clean dash for quick help here we have this option dash f which forces git to remove this on track files you also have d for removing whole directories so quite often we type git clean dash fd now let's run short status again file two is gone so this is how we undo local changes so now you know that once git tracks a file it stores every version of that file in its database and that means if you screw things we can always restore a file or a directory to a previous version so in this demo i'm going to delete a file and then show you how to restore it it's very easy so we're going to delete file1.js now i told you that if we use the rm command in linux or unix based systems this will only remove the file from the working directory so then we'll have to stage the change or the deletion a better way is to use the git rm command this will remove the file from both the working directory as well as the staging area okay now let's get a short status so in the staging area we have a deleted file now let's make a commit delete file1.js all right now let's say shoot we shouldn't have deleted this file so what can we do here well we have a few options we can undo or revert the last commit we're going to talk about that later in the course but in this lesson i want to talk about restoring a file to a previous version not on doing a commit so let's look at our history all right so here's our history we want to restore file one to the commit before the last commit that is this comment over here so we type git restore now let's have a quick look at the documentation the restore command takes three types of arguments we can supply a bunch of options we can still play a source we haven't done this so far so by default git will restore that file from the next environment or the next area so if the file you want to restore is in the working directory git will restore it from the staging area and if the file is in the staging area git will restore it from the last snapshot or the last commit now in this case we want to change the default behavior we want to restore a file from the commit before the last one so we type git restore dash source we set it to head tilde 1 and then we specify the full path to the file in this case file1.js now let's get a short status so we have a new untracked file so this is how we can restore a file to a previous version hey guys bosh here as i said before this video is the first hour of my complete git mastery course the complete course is 5 hours long and covers intermediate to advanced level concepts it comes with a certificate of completion downloadable summary notes and a 30-day money-back guarantee so if you're not happy you can ask for a refund you will learn all about browsing history branching and merging collaborating with others using git and github and rewriting history so by the end of this course you would be able to use git like a pro and work effectively with others in your team if you're interested click on the link below this video to enroll

Channel: Programming with Mosh

Views: 1,889,102

Keywords: git for beginners, git tutorial for beginners, learn git, git tutorial, how to use git, git, devops, programming, code with mosh, programming with mosh, mosh hamedani, what is git, what is git and how to use it, git explained for beginners, devops tools, git tutorial for beginners mac, git basics, git explained, git crash course, git course, introduction to git, git introduction

Id: 8JJ101D3knE

Length: 69min 13sec (4153 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 15 2020