Force pushes

There is a safer force-pushing option called --force-with-lease. It checks to make sure what you last pushed is still the latest server version before forcing a branch update. If it isn't, the command will fail with the "stale info" error.

You can set up an alias of git push for this with

$ git config --global alias.fpush push --force-with-lease

Or just use it like

$ git push --force-with-lease

Security

Sign commits with SSH

You can sign data using your existing SSH key. GitHub and GitLab support verifying these signatures if you upload your public signing key to your user account.

Set gpg.format to ssh and tell it where your signing key is

$ git config gpg.format ssh
$ git config user.signingKey ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Running git commit -S will sign your commit with this key.

Sign pushes

Git allows you to sign pushes as well as commits.¹

None of the major Git hosting solutions support this, but if they do, run

$ git push --signed

To sign the ref update on the server and have the server save a transparency log with verifiable signatures somewhere.²

Automate stuff

Add cronjobs for maintenance on your git repo

git maintenance allows you to add daily, hourly, and weekly tasks for your repositories. Turn it on for a repository by running

$ git maintenance start

This modifies your .git/config file to add a maintenance.strategy value set to incremental. incremental is a shorthand for:

• gc: disabled
• commit-graph: hourly
• prefetch: hourly
• loose-objects: daily
• incremental-repack: daily

Every hour it will rebuild your commit graph and do a prefetch, and once a day it will clean up loose files into pack-files and repack the object directory using the multi-pack-index. These features are really helpful when working with large projects.

Git configs

Git has a key/value store called git config which will check in three places for values:

• locally (in the project) at .git/config
• globally (for the user) at ~/.gitconfig
• system-wide

You can specify the value you are changing using the syntax

$ git config [--global | --system | --local] root.key "Value"

If you add to your global config the following

[includeIf "gitdir:~/project/path"]
    path = ~/.gitconfig-oss

Then Git will look in the ~/.gitconfig-oss file for values only if the project you are working in matches ~/project/path. You can also filter by branch name using onbranch or if the project matches a specific URL using hasconfig:remote.*.url.

git blame

The line range option (-L) allows you to display a subsection of the file

$ git blame -L 28,43 path/to/file

The : syntax allows Git to find the beginning of a block and only blame that block

$ git blame -L :'class LocalFile' path/to/file

Following

git blame can ignore whitespace changes to see the real person changing the code using the -w option.

The -C option allows you to look for code movement between files in a commit. It will follow refactoring of functions from one file to another, showing the last person to actually change certain lines of code. You can pass -C up to three times to follow code even harder.

$ git blame -w -C -C -C

git diff

You can change Git's command-line git diff tool to be word-based rather than line based with the --word-diff option.

Memorize and resolve conflicts automatically

Use the rerere option to have git remember the resolutions of conflicts automatically.

$ git config --global rerere.enabled true
$ git config --global rerere.autoUpdate true

autoUpdate stages the automatic resolution for you!

Sorting branches

To show branches in sorted order in git branch, we can configure the branch.sort option by

• objectsize
• authordate
• committerdate
• creatordate
• taggerdate

Or by using the --sort option.

$ git config --global branch.sort -committerdate

specifies the descending committerdate order (- is negative)

You can display the branches in columns using the column.ui option

$ git config --global column.ui auto

Or with the --column N option.

References