software development

My Favorite Git Commands and Settings

Bill Keys

Mar 19, 2019 • 2 min read

Introduction

Version control is important for any software developer and Git is now the most popular one. I will show you some of my favorite git commands and settings.

Setup name and email

Configure name and email for git commits.

Usage: git config --global user.name “[name]”

Usage: git config --global user.email “[email address]”

Handling end of line character

Windows and Unix operating systems have different end of line characters. To prevent users editing code on different systems always changing the end of line characters we add the below settings to the repository so developers don’t need to manually configure it them self’s

git add .gitattributes
git add --renormalize // update cache and normalize end of line if needed
git push

git commit

Create a new file in the root of the repo called .gitattributes.gitattributes

text=auto
*.png binary
*.jpg binary

Undo local changes

Revert any local changes before

Usage: git reset --hard <commit>

Usage: git reset [file]

Prevent local file from being added to repository

Create file called .gitignore then include files you want to prevent from being added to to your repository. Don’t forget to commit and push so everyone cloning the repository knows which files to exclude.