Useful Git commands at work

Below are solutions I curated online to solve problems related to Git when collaborating with others and working on several branches together. This post will be updated from time to time.

Copy a file from one branch to another

To copy a file to the current branch from another branch (ref)

git checkout another_branch the_file_you_want.txt

Merge changes from master branch to yours

To merge changes from another branch to yours, you can use merge or rebase depending on the preferred commit order. BitBucket has a nice tutorial discussing the difference btween the two. Usually I’d love to have the changes pulled from another branch as a single commit with git merge.

git checkout master      # the branch with changes
git pull                 # pull the remote changes to local master branch
git checkout mybranch    # go back to mybranch
git merge master         # incorporate the changes into mybranch

How to use git revert

Useful tutorial from BitBucket on git revert.

Compare differences between branches and output the results

If you want to compare the difference between your (more updated) branch and the master branch, use the command

git diff master..your_branch

You can save the comparison results into a text file with colors by

git diff master..your_branch > your_branch_to_master.diff

The color can be viewed when you open the .diff file with Sublime.

Update password for Git on Mac OS X

use the following command

git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

[to be continued]