Git

Git is an open source version control system, which supports your development tasks, especially in distributed code projects.

Installation

Git can be easily installed on Linux systems with the available package managers. E.g. for Debian based systems by apt install git.

For other systems, see the download page of Git here.

Configuration

Git can be configured by the CLI using the git config command. For first configuration it is necessary to configure at least the parameters user.name and user.email. This can be done by the following commands:

git config --global user.name "MyFancyUser"

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Using Git

The following commands can be helpful for working with git.

git command	Comment
git init	Initialize a directory as git managed repository
git clone <repo_url>	Clone a remote repository to your local client
git status	Shows uncommited changes, new files etc.
git add <wildcard_or_filename>	Stage an updated / new file to the next commit
git rm <wildcard_or_filename>	Remove a file and stage the removal for the next commit
git commit -m "<commit message">	Commit staged changes under a new commit
git commit	Will open an editor to write more descriptive commit messages. See here for a guide on good commit messages
git checkout <branch_name>	Switch to another branch
git branch	Shows a list of existing branches
git branch <branch_name>	Creates a new branch (from the currently checked out branch)
git merge <branch_name>	Merge changes from branch_name to the currently checked out branch
git push	Push commited changes to the remote repository
git pull	Pull current state from the remote repository to your local repo

Working with git-flow

Git-flow assists you by combining multiple steps of git commands to one git-flow command which will do a workflow of steps. Although git-flow makes live easier in some cases, it makes it also more complex sometimes and you need to execute some steps before or after using a git-flow command as regular git command. (See below)

As an example, here is the comparison between the regular git commands and the appropriate git-flow command for creating a release.

git-flow command	git command
git-flow feature start <feature_name>	git checkout -b feature/<feature_name> develop
git-flow feature finish <feature_name> [--squash]	git checkout develop
	git merge [--squash] --no-ff feature/<feature_name>
	git branch -d feature/<feature_name>

Another git-flow cheat sheet can be found here.

Using git-crypt

Having secret or sensitive information in your git repository is never a good choice. But sometimes it's necessary. Never push unencrypted data to your remote repository.

Git-crypt is a transparent encryption tool that works seamless with your Git repository. All sensitive information is encrypted before pushed to the remote repository. Once you've unlocked the repository locally, all data will be decrypted automatically when pulling from the remote repo. This makes development with encrypted data effortless.

To install git-crypt, you can use your package manager of choice (e.g. apt):

sudo apt install git-crypt

To initialize a new repository with git-crypt, you can use git-crypt init when located in the repository directory. An already encrypted git repository can be unlocked by git-crypt unlock. This requires you to have either the repository encryption key in your GPG keychain, or that your private GPG key has been added to the allowed keys in the repository. For more details, see the links below.

For more information, check out the official Github repository here. A tutorial on git-crypt can be found here.