Work with branches in git

This is my first article in a serie of useful tips on working with git. git is a very popular tool for collaborating on projects these days. git is a quite simple tool to use but there is still a lot of topics difficult to understand for non-experts.

I would personally recommend the book Git Pocket Guide: A Working Introduction. This book have lit a light for me on some nontrivial aspects on git like branches.

Let say you just started working on empty repo and you are working on your local branch. In my case initial-branch.

Let’s list local branches in the repo:

git branch --list

Here my output:

* initial-branch

We can also list remote branches (remote-tracking branches are local references to branches in remote repository)

git branch -r

Your collegue has created new branch and he wants you to review his code. Let’s say he created a branch full-pipeline. We need to update our local branches to get information about branches in remote repo. Use command

git fetch

Output will be like this

From gitlab.com:ximilar/customers/idtotal
* [new branch]      full-pipeline -> origin/full-pipeline
* [new branch]      master        -> origin/master

We see newly published branch full-pipeline. Switch to this new branch

git checkout full-pipeline

Check the active branch

git branch

output is

* full-pipeline
initial-branch

And list remote branches

git branch -r

Make some changes and initiate a commit

git commit -s -m 'Add fixes'

Then push changes to new branch:

git push origin initial-branch

Tracking upstream branch

There is one more thing. Tracking upstream branch ( https://mincong-h.github.io/2018/05/02/git-upstream-tracking/).

https://gist.github.com/hackjutsu/33b970dd117889485491c018543e5118

When using GitLab and create own branch we can

git pull

and get message

There is no tracking information for the current branch.
Please specify which branch you want to merge with.
See git-pull(1) for details.
git pull <remote> <branch>
If you wish to set tracking information for this branch you can do so with:
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<branch> rotation

So let’s set upstream branch

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/rotation rotation

This sets the default remote branch for the current local branch

Now git pull returns

Updating 2c0060b..6ab57f1
Fast-forward
ximilar/idtotal/text_reader.py | 4 ----
1 file changed, 4 deletions(-)

Keep git in actual state

You are working on own branch. You have done before some time a merge with master branch. Colleagues have made some edits in your files created in your new branch. In this case you need to actualize your own branch to “master” so you have got all the changes made in master branch

git fetch origin master:master

and merge the master branch with your branch

git merge master

Then simply git commit and git push your changes.

That’s it all on branches. Enjoy the learning git and good luck!