Mastering git, Part 7, git branch and tag

1. Creating a branch

It quite often happens that a software product is on a git server and developers add new features to the product. To make the job easier, developers usually create branches beside the master branch (which is the default branch) and work on their branch and once the changes are confirmed and tested, they will be merged into the master branch.

1.2 Creating a local branch

Creates a new branch, but leaves you on the same branch:

Creates a new branch and checks out the new branch:

In fact, it does the following:

If you open the HEAD file, you will see it is pointing to a branch, for instance:

If you open the

directory, you will see a file for each one of your branches:

Creating a new branch is simply a matter of writing a commit hash to a new file, and that’s the reason why Git branches are so lightweight.

1.3 Creating a remote branch

First, you create your branch locally:

The remote branch is automatically created when you push it to the remote server:

you might want to make the relationship persistent by using:

Other people in your team can reach your branch, by doing:

if instead of:

you can use the following:

You will enter a detached HEAD state.

2. Checking out a branch

 

3. Switching Branches

or

This will create a new branch

3.1 Pull another Git branch without switching

 

4. Track a remote branch

If you have already created a local branch, and you want to track it with the remote branch you just pulled down, or want to change the upstream branch you’re tracking:

Please pay attention to the -to at the end of “–set-upstream-to”. There is a deprecated flag “–set-upstream” (without to at the end) which is no longer supported.

5. Viewing Branches

5.1 Viewing local branch

To view local branches

5.2 Viewing remote branch

To see only remote branches:

5.3 Viewing all remote/ local branch

To view both remote branches and local branches

To view branches of a remote: 

for instance:

To see the tracked branches:

 

6. Deleting Branches

Deleting both local and remote branch

local and remote branches actually have nothing to do with each other, even if you’ve established a tracking connection. They are completely separate objects in Git and deleting one wouldn’t delete the other If you want any branch item to be deleted, you need to delete it explicitly.

6.1 Deleting a local branch

-D, which is an alias for –delete –force, which deletes the branch “irrespective of its merged status

6.2 Deleting a remote branch

As of Git v1.7.0, you can delete a remote branch using:

summary:

6.3 Undo/ Recover a deleted branch

First, find the SHA1 for the commit at the tip of your deleted branch:

Then:

Once you’re at that commit, you will get the followings: “You are in ‘detached HEAD‘ state.”  Create a new branch from there with the same name to recreate the deleted branch:

Or you can do the above steps in one:

Refs: [1]

7. Pushing into the wrong branch

The way Git thinks about its data is what sets it apart from all other VCS (CVS, Subversion, Perforce, Bazaar, and so on). Most other systems store data in the form of a list of file-based changes. This is commonly described as delta-based version control

Image courtesy of git-scm.com
Image courtesy of git-scm.com

Git considers its data to be a set of snapshots of a miniature file system.
Any time you commit, or save the state of your project, Git takes a snapshot of all your files at that particular moment and stores a reference to that snapshot. To be efficient, if files have not changed, Git doesn’t store the file again, just a link to the previous identical file it has already stored.

When you make a commit, Git stores a commit object that contains a pointer to the snapshot of the content you staged. This object also contains the author’s name and email address, the message that you typed, and pointers to the commit or commits that directly came before this commit (its parent or parents):

  1. zero parents for the initial commit,
  2. one parent for a normal commit,
  3. multiple parents for a commit that results from a merge of two or more branches.

Let’s make an example:

Now we have 5 objects in our repository, 3 blob , which you can see them by:

one tree that lists the contents of the directory and specifies which file names are stored as which blobs, and one commit with the pointer to that root tree and all the commit metadata.

If you make some changes and commit again, the next commit stores a pointer to the commit that came immediately before it.

A branch in Git is simply a lightweight movable pointer to one of these commits. The default branch name in Git is master. As you start making commits, you’re given a master branch that points to the last commit you made. Every time you commit, the master branch pointer moves forward automatically.

Because a branch in Git is actually a simple file that contains the 40 character SHA-1 checksum of the commit it points to, branches are cheap to create and destroy.

How does Git know what branch you’re currently on? It keeps a special pointer called HEAD.

Ref [1], [2], [3], [4]

8. A Full Example

So let’s get started and create two branches, one for developer1 and one for developer2.

 

let’s make some work on the first branches:

and some changes in the second branch:

now you should see this in git gui or if you go to Repositories> Visualize all Branch History or

You can add the later as an alias so you dont’t have to type it everytime:

Now in the git gui, go to merge>local merge and choose b1, you will get the following error because of the merge conflict:

so, call the following to solve the conflict:

choose C and save and then:

Interactive git merge visualizer

Refs: [1]

git worktree

If you are to check out more than one branch at a time, you can use git worktree.

git tag

To create a new tag:

For example, to create a tag called “v1.0”, run the command

Note: By default, the tag is created at the current HEAD (the latest commit on the current branch).
To list all existing tags, run the following command:

This will show a list of all tags in alphabetical order.

To checkout (switch to) a specific tag, run the following command:

For example, to checkout the “v1.0” tag, run the command

Note: Checking out a tag will put you in a “detached HEAD” state, which means that you are no longer on a branch.

Annotated tags are tags that contain additional information such as a tag message and the tagger’s name and email address.
To create an annotated tag, run the following command:

For example, to create an annotated tag called “v1.0” with the message “Initial release”, run the command

To push tags to a remote repository, run the following command:

For example, to push the “v1.0” tag to the remote repository, run the command

Note: If you want to push all tags to the remote repository, run the command

To delete a tag, run the following command:

For example, to delete the “v1.0” tag, run the command

Note: This only deletes the tag locally. If you want to delete a tag on the remote repository, run the command

Delete removed/ gone branches

1. git branch -v:
– This command lists all local branches along with their last commit and the upstream branch if any.
– The -v (or --verbose ) flag makes sure that the commit information is shown along with the branch name.

2. grep \[gone\] :
– This command filters the output of the previous command to only include lines that have [gone]. The [gone] tag appears next to branches that are still locally available but their corresponding remote branches have been deleted.
– The backslashes (\) before the square brackets are used to escape them, as square brackets have special meanings in regex (they define character sets), and here we want to treat them as literal characters.

3. awk '{print $1}':
awk processes the filtered list and this particular command tells awk to print the first field of each line, which in the output of git branch -v is the branch name.
– Fields in awk are by default separated by spaces, so $1 refers to the first word in each line, which is the branch name.

4. xargs -I{} git branch -D {}:
xargs takes the list of branch names produced by awk and passes them as arguments to another command.
-I{} is an option in xargs that defines a placeholder {} which can be used in the subsequent command to represent each item passed to xargs.
git branch -D {} uses the placeholder to delete each branch. The -D option forcefully deletes each specified branch without checking if it has been merged into the currently checked out branch.

GitHub automatic releases from tags and  release management

Refs: [1], [2]

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