Advanced Techniques in Git

This is a small repository to practice your skills with rebasing, interactive rebasing, and commit curation.

Challenges

Rebasing

Rebasing is the process of taking one branch and placing its changes at the end of the changes of a different branch.

1. Checkout the branch feat--add-over-the-rainbow.
2. See how there are changes in main that are not yet in feat--add-over-the-rainbow.
3. Run git rebase main to base the feat--add-over-the-rainbow branch on main.

• Confirm that feat--add-over-the-rainbow is based off of the latest changes in main.

Interactive Rebasing

Interactive rebasing is the process of modifying history by editing one commit at a time.

1. Checkout the branch feat--add-beauty-and-the-beast.
2. See how each lyric is added one line at a time. Use interactive rebasing (git rebase -i main) to see all the commits in this branch that are not in main.
3. While in interactive rebasing, reorder the commits so each commit adds one line at a time in order. Since this will cause merge conflicts, try moving only one commit at a time. When resolving conflicts, ask yourself "what would this commit look like had I made this commit in this order.

• Confirm that commits in feat--add-beauty-and-the-beast are ordered by the order of the lyric.
• Confirm that each commit in feat--add-beauty-and-the-beast only contains the contents of that specific commit and is free of merge conflicts.

Curated Commits

By curating your commits before submitting a PR, you can help onboard your reviewer by creating a narrative that is independent from your chronology of changes. This means that, before submitting a PR, you can use interactive rebasing to reorganize your commits to create a narration that reduces noise and guides the reviewer through your thinking and thought process.

1. Checkout the branch feat--add-frozen-moana-princess-and-frog.
2. Look thought the commits of this branch and imagine you were assigned to review it commit-by-commit. Instead of having a linear history that guides the reviewer through the changes, the history is a bit erratic.
3. Using interactive rebasing (git rebase -i main), make the following changes:

• Move any bug fixes unrelated to this branch to the beginning of this history (to separate it from the features of this branch).
• Fix up any bug that were created within this branch to the commit that introduced the bug (if there's no value in the reviewer seeing it).

Cherry Picking

You can use cherry picking to copy the contents of individual commits from one branch into another branch. This is an especially useful tool when commits are made in the wrong branch or in a temporary branch.

1. Checkout the branch feat--add-frozen-2.
2. Locate the commit made in this branch. We want to cherry pick this commit on the feat--add-frozen-moana-princess-and-frog branch. Copy the commit SHA and switch to to the target (feat--add-frozen-moana-princess-and-frog) branch.
3. Using cherry pick (git cherry-pick), make the following changes:

• Copy the commit from feat--add-frozen-2 to feat--add-frozen-moana-princess-and-frog.
• Use the cherry pick command (git cherry-pick) following by the SHA to apply the changes from feat--add-frozen-2 to feat--add-frozen-moana-princess-and-frog.

Git Revert

You can revert changes of a commit to undo specific changes without disrupting the history of the production branch. This is different than dropping a commit because it retains the history of both making changes and undoing them.

1. Checkout the branch feat--add-over-the-rainbow. This branch should have been rebased on main in the first challenge.
2. Merge feat--add-over-the-rainbow into main using the --ff-only flag.
3. While on main, locate the commit SHA for the merge in the last step.
4. Run git revert followed by the SHA in the previous step to revert the merge.

• Confirm the merge from feat--add-over-the-rainbow and the subsequent revert is represented in the history of main.

Branch Diagram

The following diagram shows the relationship between all challenge branches and the main branch.