Some Essential Git Commands and their usage in GitHub Workflow

What is Git?

There are some common tasks in each project during its development. We usually define and create new projects, work alone or in collaboration with others, test them, fix the errors, assess the changes done by others, and merge them.

In the traditional workflow, all these tasks may produce lots of redundancy, but the Git and GitHub have provided a new perspective in this area. If you are working alone on a project or with a team, or if your teammates are from the similar time zone or spread all over the world, Git and GitHub are the best options for managing the project progression!

Any project has a mainstream from which any contributors, branch out specific branches to apply their ideas on. After that if they are confident enough they could share their contribution to the mainstream and if the administrator of the project approves their changes, they will merge the sub-branches with the mainstream! Also, in the development process, you may need to recover or have access to any previous versions, save the changes in any points, put some notes about the changes and so on, multiple times!

In fact, the Git commands help to take some snapshots during the development process of the project. We will shape the history of the project by putting the snapshots next to each other. This history helps to track every piece of changes if it has a reasonable reason or not, decide to keep the changes or not, ask for extra information from the contributors, and do the merge!

Basic Git Commands

There are some essential Git commands to save the interaction in and between local branch and remote one:

Git Init: this command creates a hidden folder for keeping hidden data structure of the working place.

Git Clone: this command copies a full version of a remote project which already exists on the remote server.

Git Add: this command is the first part of taking snapshots. It stages the changes. Every staging is a part of the next snapshot and then part of the history of the changes.

Git Commit: this is the second part of taking snapshots. With this command, we can put this snapshot in the history of the project. Anything staged by the [git add] will be the part of the snapshot with git commit.

Git status: when we work in a special place, we may create, add or remove different files. Or even change the contents of the files. This command shows the untracked, modified or staged files in the workplace.

Git branch: shows the list of local branches we are working on.

Git merge: this command helps to merge the local branch, which is approved by the administrator of the project with the main branch.

Git pull: if you want to get the reflection of the other remote collaborators’ commits on the local branch, you have to use this command.

Git push: if you want to reflect the changes you have done on your branch, you reflect them with this command.

GitHub Work Flow

GitHub is the combination of the Git commands (as a distributed version control system) in the Hub as a conjunction of contributors and projects. In this picture, we see the workflow of contribution in the GitHub repository. GitHub uses the Git commands described in the previous section to keep the track of changes.

Using the GitHub flow, we create a new branch of a remote repository, add some commits as snapshots, open a pull request to share our changes or get some help, the collaborators may comment on our changes, test and review the pull request in the discuss and review code stage, then if the changes were reasonable they would be merged.

Note: Most of the contents of this article is adapted from the GitHub handbook from this address: https://guides.github.com/introduction/git-handbook/.