1. What are the four different phases of git that we’ve learned? What commands do you know to move changes from one phase to the next? Is there ever more than one way to move a change from one phase to another?

  2. What is the difference between git status and git log?

  3. One popular “version control” that you’ve probably used is Google Drive/Docs. How is this similar to git? How is it different?

  4. Let’s git some practice! Start by downloading some files:

    wget https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse391/25su/lectures/4/questions4.zip
unzip questions4.zip

    There should now be a directory questions4/recipes - this is actually a git repository!

    Note

    You don’t typically want to distribute git repos in a zip file (we’ve done this just for convenience). In reality, you should host your git repositories somewhere like GitHub or GitLab and download them via git clone.

    cd into the questions4/recipes repo, and then complete the following tasks:

    1. Add a third step to the sundae.txt recipe:

      1. Checkout a new branch (give it a descriptive name).

      2. Add a third step to sundae.txt with any addition you want to make to the sundae.

      3. Stage, and then commit your changes. Normally you’d want to push your branch/changes too, but we will skip this step for this exercise.

      4. Merge your branch into main. Make sure you understand which branch you should be on to perform the merge operation. Again, skip pushing your changes.

      5. When you are done, you should be able to see main pointing to your new commit, and a parent commit Add initial sundae recipe. What commands can you run to check this?

    2. There is a branch add-strawberries with some changes to sundae.txt:

      1. Try to merge add-strawberries into your new main

      2. The merge should fail due to a merge conflict. Why does this merge conflict exist? It may be helpful to view the commit graph of the repo (e.g. git log --all --graph --oneline)

      3. Resolve the merge conflict by editing the sundae.txt file. You’ll want to keep both your change and the strawberries change, and update the numbers accordingly. Be sure to remove the merge conflict metadata from the file! Once you’re done editing sundae.txt, make sure you “finish” resolving the merge conflict.

      4. If you’re successful, main should be pointing at a commit titled Merge branch 'add-strawberries' (assuming you didn’t modify the default merge commit).

  5. What is the command to show the changes between our working directory and our staging area? How about between our staging area and the local repository?

  6. Suppose you’re in a random directory on your computer and you want to check if it’s a git repository. How might you check this, without using any git commands?

  7. As you grow more experienced with git you’ll find yourself typing a lot of long commands which can be cumbersome. Luckily for us, git allows to alias many of the commands we run so we can rename them. So, for example, let’s say we want to alias status to simply st. If we wanted to do this for all git repositories on our computer, we could type 

    git config --global alias.st status
    Or, if we want to alias this for just the git repository we’re currently using: 
    git config alias.st status
    Write your own global alias for commit that makes sense for you!

  8. Caution

    The command we’re about to discuss can be very dangerous. Use this at your own risk, but it can be very useful if used correctly!

    The git reset command allows us to move changes out of a commit and back into the staging area. However, this command can be very dangerous if you’ve already pushed your changes to remote. Can you think of why this would cause problems? What might be a good rule of thumb for when to use something like git reset?