Toby's Technical Ramblings » Git

Using Git to create an archive of changed files.

Toby — Fri, 20 May 2011 11:41:02 +0000

Often I have found myself in a situation where it would be really nice to have an archive of the files I have recently been working on.

Using two Git commands I can easily create such an archive.

The first actually creates the archive;

git archive -o update.zip HEAD

This will create an archive of the entire repository, which isn’t what we want in this instance but is pretty handy to know.

The archive function accepts a list of files to archive, which is what we want to do and is where our second command comes in.

git diff --name-only HEAD^

This will do the commit before the head, which is what I want most of the time but this could be changed to get files between two commits or anything you wanted, check out the help section in git for the diff command.

Finally we want to bring this all together into one nice and easy command, thus;

git archive -o update.zip HEAD $(git diff --name-only HEAD^)

This wraps our second command with $(), this gets ran first and passes the result as a parameter into our first command.

Git command to show files changed in a commit

Toby — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 08:39:17 +0000

Recently I wanted to pull a list of changed files from an older commit from the command line.

Turns out (like most things in Git) this is very easy to do.

git show --name-only {commit}

You can replace {commit} with the SHA1 you want to retrieve, or things like HEAD or HEAD^^

Explaining Version Control (Git) in Simple Terms

Toby — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 14:28:37 +0000

Today I found a presentation that Paul Synnott made that was aimed at explaining the need for Git, or at least version control to non-developers.

I thought it was an excellent way of explaining to someone who doesn’t like technical jargon, or is too inexperienced to understand it why time should be invested in using Version Control.

I asked if I could chuck it up here for others to download and he agreed, so here it is:

Git for non-devs

Cheers, Paul!

Two excellent talks on Git

Toby — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 18:55:00 +0000

These two GoogleTechTalks videos compliment each other excellently and between them explain Git perfectly. The first is by Linus Torvalds and the second is by Randal Schwartz, unfortunately I cannot embed them but here are the links.

Useful Git Links

Toby — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:48:12 +0000

This is a post I will be adding to over time all about links I have found useful when learning how to best use Git.

Latest Edited: 21/01/12

*NEW* A successful Git branching Model – The title says it all really, a really nice way method for branching during the product life-cycle.

Git – The Simple Guide – Really nice beginners guide to Git.

How To Create And Apply A Patch – Really good article, the only thing I would clarify is that the am command can only be used once you have set up mailing (something I have yet to do).

Creating A New Branch On Your Remote Repository – Such a simple task but one I couldn’t easily find described somewhere for the layman.

Git By Example – This has all the basic git commands that anyone starting out with Git will want to familiarise themselves with complete with examples.

Branching and Merging – An interesting document on branching and merging within Git.

Thanks to @psynnott for contributing some links.

Editing Git Repository Descriptions

Toby — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:39:02 +0000

It was annoying me that when viewing my repositories online the descriptions for them all were the generic ‘Unnamed repository; edit this file ‘description’ to name the repository.’

It doesn’t really tell you in any tutorial what you need to do when setting up a repository to get a description (or at least any I have followed) but the fix is very simple.

In the your git repository you should see a text file named description.

Edit it with your text editor of choice and whatever you have as the contents will be your repository description.

vi gitRepository.git/description

Done!