Big files version control using Git Large File Storage

On our project we performed a full back up of entries on Contentful and downloaded all its assets. The assets together were about 150MB so we decided to compress them in a .zip and push it to GitHub. Unfortunately we encountered a warning that the upload limit for one file is 100MB and the git push got aborted. To solve it, we could just push the images without compressing them or…

Git Large File Storage to the rescue. Install it using your favourite tool > guide here < and all you need to do is specify the file extension that you are interested in using git lfs track "*.zip" (zip in our case, can be any other extension). All you need to do after that is just follow standard git procedure, but from now on you won’t be limited with big file uploads.

Delete all local branches except the current one

From time to time it is necessary to delete all local branches. Assuming there are branches:

git branch --verbose

  a             2eb734f6 Update image tag
  b             2eb734f6 Update image tag
  first-branch  2eb734f6 Update image tag
  second-branch 2eb734f6 Update image tag
* staging       2eb734f6 Update image tag

This command will delete all branches except the current one:

git branch | grep -v `git symbolic-ref -q --short HEAD` | xargs git branch -D

Deleted branch a (was 2eb734f6).
Deleted branch b (was 2eb734f6).
Deleted branch first-branch (was 2eb734f6).
Deleted branch second-branch (was 2eb734f6).

An alias is handy:

alias gdal="git branch | grep -v `git symbolic-ref -q --short HEAD` | xargs git branch -D"

git patch file from the last commit

git show HEAD > my_feature.patch

and you will find my_feature.patch file in your app directory :)

Easy way to create a patch with Git

1. Create a new branch from master
2. Add code to this branch
3. Commit
4. Repeat points 2 and 3 if necessary ;)

Perform git format-patch master --stdout > my_feature.patch

and you will find my_feature.patch file in your app directory :)

Git diff excluding file

Following will show current branch diff excluding package-lock.json file.

git diff -- . ':(exclude)package-lock.json'

Revert^2

In the given scenario:

1. Pull request was merged
2. The connected branch#1 was removed
3. Merged PR was reverted
4. You don’t have branch#1, but you can see the reverted commit#1

All you have to do is to track the commit#1 and revert reverted commit.

$ git revert commit#1

Clean up local list of your git branches

Have you ever had to search through a long list of local branches, which are mostly obsolete for you?

To keep your local git repository slim and avoid a long list of branches while doing git branch, there is an easy strategy that can save you a bit of time.

First, always remember to push everything you did to the remote when you leave a desk, then just run in the console:

git branch | grep -v "master" | xargs git branch -D

It will remove all your local branches except master. If you need to restore any particular branch, you can fetch and checkout - it will wait for you on your remote!

Keeping git coloring when piping

git log    

produces colored output, but when using pipe it loses color information

git log | head

but this can be fixed with

git log --color=always | head 

Special thanks to Dude :D

Git global excluding files

To exclude all unwanted files(.rakeTasks, .tool-version etc.) you can create a global config for git. git config --global core.excludesfile ~/.gitignore_global and in this file:

.rakeTasks
.tool-versions

Have you Cmd-C'd your overcommit and lost your changes?

During overcommit running I have interrupted the process and received following message

Interrupt signal received. Stopping hooks...

⚠  Hook run interrupted by user

then

Unable to restore working tree after pre-commit hooks run:
STDOUT:
STDERR:unable to refresh index

To my horror, all my changes were lost! Fortunately, those were kept in stash, so simple git stash pop helped :) More info here

Remove sensitive data from git repository.

When you forgot to use secrets from the very beginning - and some secrets landed in your repository eg. login/password/secret_key you can remove them in a simple way using filter-branch for example to remove password you need to use:

git filter-branch --tree-filter "find . -type f -exec sed -i -e 's/password/**REMOVED**/g' {} \;"

It will replace password with **REMOVED** in the whole repo and commits.

Rebase pull having uncommitted changes

Do you want to pull with --rebase option, but you have some uncommitted changes? Do you need to git stash and git stash pop every time? Suffer no more with auto stash!

git pull --rebase --autostash origin $(git_current_branch)

or

git config --global rebase.autoStash true
# and then
git pull --rebase

Note: this works only in git 2.6 or newer.