Some Additional Topics#
In the spirit of “you don’t know what you don’t know”, here is a list of ten (ish) topics which were beyond the scope of the course. Each topic is situational, but if any might apply to your work, links are provided for further reading.
1. Alternatives to git#
There are many programs that can handle version control. Two that are particularly popular and frequently compared to git are
Subversion (SVN), and
2. Other forms of GitHub authentication#
Two alternative to the personal access tokens are SSH keys and the git credential manager.
See GitHub Authentication Document and GCM.
3. Git hooks#
Run local scripts during git steps, such as:
pre-commit checks for syntax errors
post-checkout report generation
4. GitHub actions#
Run workflows on remote servers after GitHub events, such as:
Running a test suite before approving a pull request
Generating and uploading documentation
See GitHub Actions.
5. Signing commits#
Attach a signature to a local commit to verify yourself as the committer (otherwise anyone could use your name and e-mail address).
6. Git log grep and “pick-axe”#
Git log can show only commits where changes match a search pattern, or be used to follow changes through line moves and file renames.
7. git bisect#
Quickly find a specific change to behaviour by bisecting the history. For example, find a change in 1024 commits in 10 steps, or in 2048 in 11 steps.
See Git Docs: git-bisect.
8. Git Large File Storage#
Git extension to upload large files and get a SHA, without tracking changes.
See Git-LFS
9. Reduced clones (sparse-checkout, filtered checkout)#
Options for reducing the download time of large repositories. Can be
Blobless: only downloads files as they’re checked out (still aware of all history and file structure of history) –
git clone --filter=blob:none <url>Treeless: as blobless but also leaves out file tree for each commit; smaller download but some loss of functionality –
git clone --filter=tree:0 <url>Shallow clone: also leave out the history; local version of repository only has one commit! –
git clone --depth=1
See GitHub Blog: Get up to speed with partial clone and shallow clone
10. Submodules#
Include clones of other repositories in a subdirectory of your repository, with a reference to a commit. (Submodules don’t seem to be too popular, so other solutions might be preferable.)
See Git Docs: git-submodule and Pro Git: Git Tools - Submodules.
11. git blame#
Show the commit details next to each line in a file.
This is better seen on GitHub or in a IDE (such as VS Code) than with the git blame command.
See GitHub Docs: Viewing the line-by-line revision history for a file.
12. Download a pull request#
In some cases we might want to directly push to- or pull from- a pull request (say the author isn’t responding). We can see the full set of references on the remote with
git ls-remote