Development/Tutorials/Git/Basics

This tutorial will show you the basics for Git.

Setting up Git

For Git to work properly, it needs to store some personal information for use in email merge requests and in the commit logging.

git config --global user.name "Your Name" git config --global user.email you@example.com

Additionally, to allow colorized output in Git:

git config --global color.ui true

There are other additional color-related features which are discussed in the fine documentation that comes with Git.

If you experience problems with colorized output, try adding the following to your ~/.bashrc

1. R needed for git colours

export LESS="-RIM"

First steps with Git

Getting started with Git for KDE is fairly easy. First, run the following:

git clone <REPOSITORY URL>

The <REPOSITORY URL> for the KDE-Qt repository is discussed on the Qt Prerequisites wiki page.

This creates a local copy of the upstream repository. Now change into that directory and code away. When updating, run:

git pull

To check the status of the repository. use the status sub-command to view the state of the local copy:

$ git status

1. On branch master
3. Initial commit
5. Untracked files:
6. (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
8. testfile

nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

If 'testfile' should be added to the local copy, run the add sub command:

$ git add testfile

Once 'testfile' has all the changes desired, commit it to the local copy:

$ git commit -m "This is the first commit" Created initial commit 246d7aa: This is the first commit

1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 testfile

Much like svn status, if you change a file once it has been committed, running git status will show that the file was modifed since last commit:

$ echo "new content" > testfile $ git status

1. On branch master
2. Changed but not updated:
3. (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
5. modified: testfile

no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Branches and merging are cheap in Git

When creating changes to the code from the upstream repository that will later get merged back upstream, branches are highly recommended.

To view the current set of branches available, run git branch. The branch with a proceeding '*' is the active one. To create a new branch called "bugfix-branch" for example, run:

$ git branch bugfix-branch $ git checkout bugfix-branch Switched to branch "bugfix-branch"

Make the necessary changes to the branch and then get ready to merge them back to the master branch

$ git checkout master Switched to branch "master" $ ls testfile $ git merge bugfix-branch Updating 14a9802..3264357 Fast forward

newfile |    1 +
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 newfile

$ ls newfile testfile

If there had been changes made to the branch, git would have automatically tried to merge the changes in the bugfix-branch with the master branch.

Rarely, this can cause a merge conflict. In those cases, manually edit the files that conflict in the master branch, and then do a git commit -a to complete the merge. Git indicates the conflicting lines within the file that cannot be auto-merged.

Viewing the Change log

To view the change log for a given file in the local copy, run git log <FILENAME>.

$ git log testfile commit 14a9802e249413003d1fa40002baa025aa54c75f Author: Carsten Niehaus <carsten@moinmoin.site> Date: Fri Apr 18 18:07:18 2008 +0200

   Second commit

commit 246d7aad05139314e7ff62a5becb6c930f72fb8f Author: Carsten Niehaus <carsten@moinmoin.site> Date: Fri Apr 18 18:06:33 2008 +0200

   This is the first commit