Useful git commands

Commit nothing

Sometimes you need to just commit something to trigger some CI/CD process. This is how you do that:

git commit --allow-empty -m "Trigger notification"

See the remote

I frequently mislabel project folders on my local and easily lose-track of the remote each directory points to. The solution, this short git config command that shows me the remote URL:

git config --get remote.origin.url

Another way you can do this is open the git config file in a text editor like Nano or VIM. The config file can be found within the .git directory at the root of your project:

nano .git/config

The output of which would look something like this (example taken from the Hugo static site generator documentation repository):

[core]
        repositoryformatversion = 0
        filemode = true
        bare = false
        logallrefupdates = true
        ignorecase = true
        precomposeunicode = true
[remote "origin"]
        url = https://github.com/gohugoio/hugoDocs.git
        fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
        remote = origin
        merge = refs/heads/master

Stop git tracking file permissions (chmod)

Occasionally repositories bring with them their permissions that need to be updated on the remote. A nightmare when working with deploy keys as they’re one way. So set the following config rule to false to stop git from tracking file permissions / chmod changes.

git config core.fileMode false

Debug ssh/git authentication

The following command runs an ssh test connection with the -T flag that tests an SSH connection to a remote. In this case, it tests the current account has the correct credentials to access BitBucket.

ssh -T git@bitbucket.org

Find branches that have/not been merged yet

Useful when removing “checked out” branches from your machine. The last argument is the branch you want to check against, in our example here it is develop.

git branch --no-merged develop

Export the log as a file

Useful if you want to export a list of commits into a spreadsheet and do some analysis but personally only ever used this once.

# Local Dates:
git log --date=local > commits.txt

# ISO Dates:
git log --date=iso --pretty=format:"%h%x09%an%x09%ad%x09%s" > commits.iso.tsv.txt

git log --date=iso --pretty=format:'"%h","%an","%ad","%s"' > commits.excel.tsv.txt

# Another date form
git log --pretty=format:%h,%an,%ad,%s > commits.txt

git config --global core.editor "nano"

Change last commit message*

^*On the last non-pushed commit.

This will directly edit the message.

git commit --amend -m "New commit message"

Shortening this to the following opens the whole commit into an editor for updating.

git commit --amend