Using Git

Now that you hopefully understand what Git is designed to do at a fundamental level - how it tracks and stores content, how it stores branches and merges and tracks remote copies of the repository, let's see how to actually use it. This next section presents some of the basic commands that you will need to know in order to use Git effectively.

At the end of each chapter, there will be a link to the official Git documentation for each of the commands used in that section, in case you want to learn more or see all the options for that command.

Setting Up Your Profile

For every commit you do, Git will try to associate a name and email address. One of the first things you'll want to do in Git is to set these values. You can set them as global configuration values with the git config command:

git config --global user.name "Scott Chacon"
git config --global user.email "schacon@gmail.com"

This will create a new ~/.gitconfig file that will look like this:

$ cat ~/.gitconfig
[user]
        name = Scott Chacon
        email = schacon@gmail.com

You can change those variables at any time, either by editing that file, or running the git config commands again.

If you want to set different values for a specific project, just leave out the --global and it will write the same snippet into your .git/config file in that repository, which will overwrite your global values.

• git config