These are just notes of my experience with git and github. If you know of better/best practices, by all means let me know.
Initially I had trouble running fetch or push to my github repository. Every time I ran fetch, for instance, I got:
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
The reason I was getting this – I think – is that I ran
git remote add origin git://github.com/username/myrepo
whereas if you visited http://github.com/username/myrepo, the setting was for https rather than git.
Regardless, I got fetching to work by running:
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/myrepo
The moral of the story: pay attention to the protocol.
commit changes efficiently
Using -a automatically stages any files you previously tracked.
git commit -a -m 'added new edit'
The benefit: you don’t have to run git add for every file you change.
Remove file from staging area but leave on hard drive:
git rm --cached somefile.txt
Create and move to new branch:
git checkout -b newbranchname
Show the diffs from the last two commits:
git log -p -2
More on git logs here.
How to unmodify a modified file here (ie, how to change back to previous version).
Stackoverflow post on the difference between git pull and git fetch: basically, pull both fetches and merges from remote into local.