Git is becoming one of the most popular version control tools. In this post, we introduce some commonly used commands for playing with Git.

Fast Commit

$ git commit -a -m "commit message"

Remember Credential on Windows

• configure for storing your credential

$ git config credential.helper store
$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
Username: <type your username>
Password: <type your password>

several days later

$ git push http://example.com/repo.git
[your credentials are used automatically]

Reset Last Commit

$ git commit -m "Something terribly misguided" # your last commit
$ git reset --soft HEAD^   # reset

It is extremely useful, when you encounter LARGE file problems

Skip Changes in Certain Files

$ git update-index --no-skip-worktree <file>
$ git add -p <file>
$ git update-index --skip-worktree <file>

Ignore Certain Files

If you want skip (ignore) certain type of files, the following configuration can be applied: Edit file “.gitignore”, and add the types you want to ignore, for example,

# ignore thumbnails created by windows
Thumbs.db
# Ignore files build by Visual Studio
*.user
*.aps
*.pch
*.vspscc
*_i.c
*_p.c
*.ncb
*.suo
*.bak
*.cache
*.ilk
*.log
[Bb]in
[Dd]ebug*/
*.sbr
obj/
[Rr]elease*/
_ReSharper*/

Push Local Branch to New Remote Repository

Suppose you have made a empty repository and named it myapp.git, you can:

$ git remote add <branch_name> <repository_url>

where <branch_name> can be any valid name you want. Then, you can push your local branch to the newly created remote repository by using

$ git push <branch_name> master

Resolve Large File Failure Problem

Suppose you git push your local repository to Github, however it failed because of some large-size files. And you might continue to experience git push failure, even if you have removed or ignore such large files. You can use the following commands to resolve such a problem by deleting those files in your history.

$ git filter-branch --index-filter 'git rm -r --cached --ignore-unmatch <file/dir>' HEAD

Of course, by using the above solution, you cannot upload your large file to Github. Recently, Github had released a tool to help you handle with large file. More details, you can refer to An open source Git extension for versioning large files