Tracking Changes
Overview
Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
How do I record changes in Git?
How do I check the status of my version control repository?
How do I record notes about what changes I made and why?
Objectives
Go through the modify-add-commit cycle for one or more files.
Explain where information is stored at each stage of that cycle.
Distinguish between descriptive and non-descriptive commit messages.
First let’s make sure we’re still in the right directory.
You should be in the planets
directory.
$ cd ~/example_git
Let’s create a file called steps.txt
that contains some notes
about how to create a git repo.
We’ll use nano
to edit the file;
you can use whatever editor you like.
In particular, this does not have to be the core.editor
you set globally earlier. But remember, the bash command to create or edit a new file will depend on the editor you choose (it might not be nano
). For a refresher on text editors, check out “Which Editor?” in The Unix Shell lesson.
$ nano steps.txt
Type the text below into the steps.txt
file:
to initialise a repo: git init
Let’s first verify that the file was properly created by running the list command (ls
):
$ ls
steps.txt
steps.txt
contains a single line, which we can see by running:
$ cat steps.txt
to initialise a repo: git init
If we check the status of our project again, Git tells us that it’s noticed the new file:
$ git status
On branch master
No commits yet
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
steps.txt
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)
The “untracked files” message means that there’s a file in the directory
that Git isn’t keeping track of.
We can tell Git to track a file using git add
:
$ git add steps.txt
and then check that the right thing happened:
$ git status
On branch master
No commits yet
Changes to be committed:
(use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
new file: steps.txt
Git now knows that it’s supposed to keep track of steps.txt
,
but it hasn’t recorded these changes as a commit yet.
To get it to do that,
we need to run one more command:
$ git commit -m "First step for using git"
[master (root-commit) f22b25e] First step for using git
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 steps.txt
When we run git commit
,
Git takes everything we have told it to save by using git add
and stores a copy permanently inside the special .git
directory.
This permanent copy is called a commit
(or revision) and its short identifier is f22b25e
. Your commit may have another identifier.
We use the -m
flag (for “message”)
to record a short, descriptive, and specific comment that will help us remember later on what we did and why.
If we just run git commit
without the -m
option,
Git will launch nano
(or whatever other editor we configured as core.editor
)
so that we can write a longer message.
Good commit messages start with a brief (<50 characters) statement about the
changes made in the commit. Generally, the message should complete the sentence “If applied, this commit will”
If we run git status
now:
$ git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean
it tells us everything is up to date.
If we want to know what we’ve done recently,
we can ask Git to show us the project’s history using git log
:
$ git log
commit f22b25e3233b4645dabd0d81e651fe074bd8e73b
Author: DC User <dcuser@obss.2020>
Date: Thu Aug 22 09:51:46 2013 -0400
First step for using git
git log
lists all commits made to a repository in reverse chronological order.
The listing for each commit includes
the commit’s full identifier
(which starts with the same characters as
the short identifier printed by the git commit
command earlier),
the commit’s author,
when it was created,
and the log message Git was given when the commit was created.
Where Are My Changes?
If we run
ls
at this point, we will still see just one file calledsteps.txt
. That’s because Git saves information about files’ history in the special.git
directory mentioned earlier so that our filesystem doesn’t become cluttered (and so that we can’t accidentally edit or delete an old version).
Now we want to add more information to the file.
(Again, we’ll edit with nano
and then cat
the file to show its contents;
you may use a different editor, and don’t need to cat
.)
$ nano steps.txt
$ cat steps.txt
to initialise a repo: git init
to check status: git status
When we run git status
now,
it tells us that a file it already knows about has been modified:
$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified: steps.txt
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
The last line is the key phrase:
“no changes added to commit”.
We have changed this file,
but we haven’t told Git we will want to save those changes
(which we do with git add
)
nor have we saved them (which we do with git commit
).
So let’s do that now. It is good practice to always review
our changes before saving them. We do this using git diff
.
This shows us the differences between the current state
of the file and the most recently saved version:
$ git diff
diff --git a/steps.txt b/steps.txt
index df0654a..315bf3a 100644
--- a/steps.txt
+++ b/steps.txt
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
to initialise a repo: git init
+to check status: git status
The output is cryptic because
it is actually a series of commands for tools like editors and patch
telling them how to reconstruct one file given the other.
If we break it down into pieces:
- The first line tells us that Git is producing output similar to the Unix
diff
command comparing the old and new versions of the file. - The second line tells exactly which versions of the file
Git is comparing;
df0654a
and315bf3a
are unique computer-generated labels for those versions. - The third and fourth lines once again show the name of the file being changed.
- The remaining lines are the most interesting, they show us the actual differences
and the lines on which they occur.
In particular,
the
+
marker in the first column shows where we added a line.
After reviewing our change, it’s time to commit it:
$ git commit -m "notes on how to check status"
$ git status
On branch master
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified: steps.txt
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
Whoops:
Git won’t commit because we didn’t use git add
first.
Let’s fix that:
$ git add steps.txt
$ git commit -m "notes on how to check status"
[master 34961b1] notes on how to check status
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
Git insists that we add files to the set we want to commit before actually committing anything. This allows us to commit our changes in stages and capture changes in logical portions rather than only large batches. For example, suppose we’re adding a few citations to relevant research to our thesis. We might want to commit those additions, and the corresponding bibliography entries, but not commit some of our work drafting the conclusion (which we haven’t finished yet).
To allow for this, Git has a special staging area where it keeps track of things that have been added to the current changeset but not yet committed.
Staging Area
If you think of Git as taking snapshots of changes over the life of a project,
git add
specifies what will go in a snapshot (putting things in the staging area), andgit commit
then actually takes the snapshot, and makes a permanent record of it (as a commit). If you don’t have anything staged when you typegit commit
, Git will prompt you to usegit commit -a
orgit commit --all
, which is kind of like gathering everyone to take a group photo! However, it’s almost always better to explicitly add things to the staging area, because you might commit changes you forgot you made. (Going back to the group photo simile, you might get an extra with incomplete makeup walking on the stage for the picture because you used-a
!) Try to stage things manually, or you might find yourself searching for “git undo commit” more than you would like!
Let’s watch as our changes to a file move from our editor to the staging area and into long-term storage. First, we’ll add another line to the file:
$ nano steps.txt
$ cat steps.txt
to initialise a repo: git init
to check status: git status
to add a file: git add
$ git diff
diff --git a/steps.txt b/steps.txt
index 315bf3a..b36abfd 100644
--- a/steps.txt
+++ b/steps.txt
@@ -1,2 +1,3 @@
to initialise a repo: git init
to check status: git status
+to add a file: git add
So far, so good:
we’ve added one line to the end of the file
(shown with a +
in the first column).
Now let’s put that change in the staging area
and see what git diff
reports:
$ git add steps.txt
$ git diff
There is no output: as far as Git can tell, there’s no difference between what it’s been asked to save permanently and what’s currently in the directory. However, if we do this:
$ git diff --staged
diff --git a/steps.txt b/steps.txt
index 315bf3a..b36abfd 100644
--- a/steps.txt
+++ b/steps.txt
@@ -1,2 +1,3 @@
to initialise a repo: git init
to check status: git status
+to add a file: git add
it shows us the difference between the last committed change and what’s in the staging area. Let’s save our changes:
$ git commit -m "notes on how to add"
[master 005937f] note on how to add
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
check our status:
$ git status
On branch master
nothing to commit, working directory clean
and look at the history of what we’ve done so far:
$ git log
commit 005937fbe2a98fb83f0ade869025dc2636b4dad5
Author: DC User <dcuser@obss.2020>
Date: Thu Aug 22 10:14:07 2013 -0400
notes on how to add
commit 34961b159c27df3b475cfe4415d94a6d1fcd064d
Author: DC User <dcuser@obss.2020>
Date: Thu Aug 22 10:07:21 2013 -0400
notes on how to check status
commit f22b25e3233b4645dabd0d81e651fe074bd8e73b
Author: DC User <dcuser@obss.2020>
Date: Thu Aug 22 09:51:46 2013 -0400
First step for using git
Word-based diffing
Sometimes, e.g. in the case of the text documents a line-wise diff is too coarse. That is where the
--color-words
option ofgit diff
comes in very useful as it highlights the changed words using colors.
Paging the Log
When the output of
git log
is too long to fit in your screen,git
uses a program to split it into pages of the size of your screen. When this “pager” is called, you will notice that the last line in your screen is a:
, instead of your usual prompt.
- To get out of the pager, press Q.
- To move to the next page, press Spacebar.
- To search for
some_word
in all pages, press / and typesome_word
. Navigate through matches pressing N.
Limit Log Size
To avoid having
git log
cover your entire terminal screen, you can limit the number of commits that Git lists by using-N
, whereN
is the number of commits that you want to view. For example, if you only want information from the last commit you can use:$ git log -1
commit 005937fbe2a98fb83f0ade869025dc2636b4dad5 Author: DC User <dcuser@obss.2020> Date: Thu Aug 22 10:14:07 2013 -0400 notes on how to add
You can also reduce the quantity of information using the
--oneline
option:$ git log --oneline
005937f notes on how to add 34961b1 notes on how to check status f22b25e First step for using git
You can also combine the
--oneline
option with others. One useful combination adds--graph
to display the commit history as a text-based graph and to indicate which commits are associated with the currentHEAD
, the current branchmaster
, or other Git references:$ git log --oneline --graph
* 005937f (HEAD -> master) notes on how to add * 34961b1 notes on how to check status * f22b25e First sep for using git
Directories
Two important facts you should know about directories in Git.
Git does not track directories on their own, only files within them. Try it for yourself:
$ mkdir example_scripts $ git status $ git add example_scripts $ git status
Note, our newly created empty directory
example_scripts
does not appear in the list of untracked files even if we explicitly add it (viagit add
) to our repository. This is the reason why you will sometimes see.gitkeep
files in otherwise empty directories. Unlike.gitignore
, these files are not special and their sole purpose is to populate a directory so that Git adds it to the repository. In fact, you can name such files anything you like.If you create a directory in your Git repository and populate it with files, you can add all files in the directory at once by:
git add <directory-with-files>
Try it for yourself:
$ touch example_scripts/qc.sh example_scripts/analysis.sh $ git status $ git add example_scripts $ git status
Before moving on, we will commit these changes.
$ git commit -m "Some example scripts"
To recap, when we want to add changes to our repository,
we first need to add the changed files to the staging area
(git add
) and then commit the staged changes to the
repository (git commit
):
This lesson was derived from https://swcarpentry.github.io/git-novice/04-changes/index.html
Key Points
git status
shows the status of a repository.Files can be stored in a project’s working directory (which users see), the staging area (where the next commit is being built up) and the local repository (where commits are permanently recorded).
git add
puts files in the staging area.
git commit
saves the staged content as a new commit in the local repository.Write a commit message that accurately describes your changes.