Git commands cheat sheet

September 8, 2021

When I was learning Git, in order to avoid giant articles and get right to the commands I needed reminding of, I made myself a cheat sheet that plainly and succinctly explained each Git command. Here is that quick and dirty guide of Git commands that you will likely use often as a web developer.

Setting up git

Clone an existing remote repo to work on locally.

git clone https://github.com/username/repo.git

If not cloning and starting from scratch, initialize git within the current working directory.

git init

Configure your username & email in git. (Only need to do once per machine.)

git config --global user.name "username"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Change master branch to main. (From here on out this guide will presume you use main.)

git branch -M main

Set a remote repository (e.g. on Github, Bitbucket, etc.) as the origin, basically you are telling git that this remote repo is the default you will be pushing to and pulling from.

git remote add origin https://github.com/username/repo.git

Staging and committing files

Stage files modified since the last commit.

git add . # Stage all modified files
git add --all # Same as the above
git add file1.html file2.html file3.js # Stage files
git add folder/* # Stage all files in a specific directory
git add *.html # Stage only specific types of files

Editing staged files.

git reset # Unstage ALL staged files, keep changes to the file
git restore --staged path/file1.html # Unstage specific files, keep changes

Commit staged files, using the -m flag to add a message without quotation marks.

git commit -m "changed colors, added fireworks"

Edit the message of last commit.

git commit --amend
git commit -a # short-hand for the above

Undo the last commit, BEFORE pushing to remote. Changes to files and directories will be kept.

git reset HEAD

Totally undo all changes since the last commit, and restore deleted files. Be careful using this!

git reset HEAD --hard

Using above command does not remove any newly created files since last commit. AFTER using it to undo changes and restore deleted files, delete NEW files and directories like this. (-f specifies files, -d specifies directories)

git clean -fd

Check what stage of the git workflow all tracked (modified) files are in.

git status

Pushing to and pulling from remote repos

Push to main branch on your default remote.

git push

The first time you push a commit, you will need to designate an upstream branch (the branch of the remote repo that you will track) or git will bother you about it. If this is your own project, your upstream will probably be the production branch — i.e. main or master.

git push --set-upstream origin main

To pull and apply changes from remote repos.

git pull # This will pull from origin's main branch if it is set as upstream, like abov

git pull bitbucket-repo # Pull from specific remote repo

Dealing with branches

Switch to a branch, use -c to create if it doesn’t already exist.

git switch -c new-branch

Push a branch to remote repo.

git push origin new-branch # Push branch to original

git push new-branch # Or if origin is set you can omit it

git push other-repo new-branch # Push to another remote that you already set up

Merge committed changes in a branch (let’s say it’s called new-feature) with the main branch.

git switch main # Make sure to switch from the other branch to main first

git merge new-feature # This applies the actual merge locally

If the merge has conflicts, you can undo it.

git merge --abort

Sometimes git will not undo a merge with —abort, usually because there were changes made after the merge. To force undoing the merge at this point use the —continue flag.

git merge --continue

Delete a LOCAL branch. This does NOT affect remote branches!

git branch -d branch-name

Sometimes git will refuse to delete a branch, like if it has commits that the main branch does not. Force deletion with -D

git branch -D branch-name # capital D instead of lowercase d

Delete a REMOTE branch. Here we don’t use git branch but instead git push with added options.

git push origin --delete branch-name

Multiple remote repos

Above I explained how to add a remote repo as origin, making it the default. But what if you want to push your project to multiple remotes, even on different git hosts? For example, say your origin is on Github, but you also want copies of your project on Bitbucket and Gitlab. (Let’s assume you name these bitbucket-repo & gitlab-repo locally.)

git remote add gitlab-repo https://[email protected]/username/repo.git

git remote add bitbucket-repo https://[email protected]/username/repo.git

Now you can push to those additional remotes by specifying the name and branch.

git push bitbucket-repo main

git push gitlab-repo main

To “track” a branch when adding a remote, making that branch the default for the remote.

git remote add -t main gitlab-repo https://[email protected]/username/repo.git

By tracking the main branch on the remote “gitlab-repo” and can do the following.

git push gitlab-repo # No need to specify main branch once tracked

Dealing with forks

Let’s say you’ve forked an existing repo on Github, your version of that repo under your account is origin. The pre-existing repo you forked is upstream. If you wanted to pull updates from the upstream repo, you do the following.

git switch main # Make sure you are on the main local branch

git remote add -t main upstream https://github.com/username/repo.git # Add a remote as upstream and track the main branch
git fetch upstream # This fetches metadata of the changes between the upstream and your local repo, but nothing changes locally yet
git merge origin/upstream # Merge fetched changes from the upstream into your local rep

Advanced use cases

There’s way too many advanced commands, and options for these commands, that I haven’t even learned yet! So here’s a few additional random commands I’ve picked up along the way, though this is in no way a complete list.

To “detach HEAD” and explore a prior commit, you’ll need the commit’s hash ID from Github.

git checkout 6e751bc32

If you want to create a new branch from this old commit, and switch to it.

git switch -c new-branch

Or if you want to go back. (Reattach HEAD to most recent commit.)

git switch -

Revert the remote ORIGIN to this old commit. (Be careful doing this!)

git revert 6e751bc32

There’s more advanced commands I’m not going to talk about until I use them myself — things like git rebase, and I’m also not showing all the different ways to use git checkout because I don’t know even half of them. I’ll make a future blog post as I learn more of these.