Aside from contributing to other people's projects, Git is widely used as a collaboration tool between software development teams. It can be used to aid in project management, code reviews, documentation, among others.
To get started on collaborating with your team, you should know how to create, merge, and delete branches.
Nearly every VCS has some form of branching support. Branching means you diverge from the main line of development and continue to do work without messing with that main line. In many VCS tools, this is a somewhat expensive process, often requiring you to create a new copy of your source code directory, which can take a long time for large projects.
Some people refer to Git’s branching model as its killer feature, and it certainly sets Git apart in the VCS community. Why is it so special? The way Git branches is incredibly lightweight, making branching operations nearly instantaneous, and switching back and forth between branches generally just as fast. Unlike many other VCSs, Git encourages workflows that branch and merge often, even multiple times in a day. Understanding and mastering this feature gives you a powerful and unique tool and can entirely change the way that you develop.
- Open your console and navigate to the location of your forked
git-party.
$ cd <path-to-directory>- Check the branches available on your local copy.
$ git branchRight now, you only have the main branch.
- Check the all of the branches available on both your local and remote repositories.
$ git branch --allYou should be able to see something like this:
* main
remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/main
remotes/origin/christine
remotes/origin/issa
remotes/origin/alyssonThis indicates that you have 4 branches: main, christine, issa and alysson, on your remote named origin.
- Create your own local branch and push it to your remote repository.
$ git checkout -b <your-name> main
$ git push origin <your-name>This switches you to a new branch called <your-name> on your local copy which contains what's exactly in main. You can verify it by using git branch again.
To switch back and forth between local branches, use git checkout <branch-name>.
To checkout a remote branch, fetch it first using git fetch <branch-name> before checking it out using git checkout <branch-name>.
- Pull the changes from
alysson.
$ git pull origin alyssonPulling basically gets and integrates the changes made on a remote branch to the local branch that you have checked out.
Pulling changes before editing and/or committing helps in avoiding conflicts, especially when people are working on the same parts of a single file.
- Open
20180526.mdunder thetoday-i-learnedfolder. Add what you learned about Git today or what you liked the most about our Git party. Sign it off with your name and GitHub account!
* "A git pull a day keeps the conflicts away." - [Alysson Alvaran](https://github.com/alyssonalvaran)- Add and commit it to your local repository.
$ git add "today-i-learned/20180526.md"
$ git commit -m "Add what I learned today"- Checkout the
mainbranch and merge your changes from your<your-name>branch.
$ git checkout main
$ git merge <your-name>Unlike pulling, merging gets the changes from the local branch that you've specified. This is helpful when you're working on a different branches locally.
- Now that you've merged the changes to your
mainbranch, try deleting<your-name>locally.
$ git branch -d <your-name>Since you've pushed <your-name> to your remote repo earlier, if you try to get the list of all available branches via git branches --all, you'll see that <your-name> still exists remotely.
- Delete your branch remotely as well.
$ git push origin --delete <your-name>- Finally, create a pull request in the orginal
git-partyrepository!
You can now collaborate with your friends on GitHub!
Do you have an awesome project in mind? Share it with us and who knows, people might just get interested in collaborating with you and contributing to your project!
Feel free to ask and participate in our Gitter chat room!