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Programming Fundamentals and Data Structures

Git and Version Control

Topic: Git and version control.

Accompanying video

Concepts

Section titled “Concepts”
  • Git repository
  • staging area (git add)
  • commit, commit hash, commit log (commit history)
  • branch
  • checkout
  • remote
  • .git folder
  • .gitignore file
  • git config vs git config --global
  • rebase, merge
  • PR (Pull Request)
  • git push, git pull

Questions

Section titled “Questions”
  • How can you obtain a copy of a Git repository from GitHub, including its full history, on another computer?
Answer

You could create a new repository on the other computer, link it to the remote repository on GitHub, and run git pull. Another option is to use git clone, which also automatically checks out the correct default branch.

  • How can you create a Pull Request using Git (not GitHub)?
Answer You cannot. The concept of a Pull Request does not exist in Git.
  • You created a branch for feature1 based on the main branch and worked on it. Then you created a branch for feature2, also based on the main branch, and worked on it. You opened a PR and merged feature1 into the main branch. You then updated your local main branch with git pull. How should you now correctly merge feature2 into the main branch?
Answer You can open a PR directly from feature2 into the main branch. If there are no conflicts, the PR can be merged.

If there are conflicts, the best approach is to run git rebase master while on the feature2 branch, resolve the conflicts locally in the affected files, and use git rebase --continue after resolving them.

Then update the branch on GitHub using git push --force or git push --force-with-lease (--force is needed because rebasing rewrites the branch’s commit history). The PR will update automatically and will no longer show conflicts (a PR is always relative to the branch’s current state, not its initial state).