Git for Beginners: Basics and Essential Commands

Hey Everyone,

In the previous blog, I talked about what is inside Git. If you haven’t checked it out yet, give it a read for a better understanding.

Git is a tool to track changes, store history, and allow multiple developers to collaborate safely.

Now let’s start with the basic Git commands 🚀

To start with the git repository, we need to first initialize it and the command for it is below

git init

Checking the Status

It will create a .git folder in your project folder.

To see the current state of your project — like which files are untracked or changed — we use:

git status

Staging the Changes

Once you know what has changed, you need to stage the files. for that we run below commad

git add filename // for single file

git add . // for all files

Committing the changes

After staging, you need to capture a snapshot by committing:

git commit -m "" // for message

The -m flag is used to write a commit message that describes what changed.

The basic workflow looks like this:

working in directory → staging → commit

Branching

To create a new in your repository, you will run the following command

git branch branchname // for creating a branch
git checkout branchname // for changing your branch to new branch you created

// there is also a shortcut to perform the above two steps in one step
git checkout -b branchname // this will create and checkout to the created branch

Stashing

Suppose you were working on something but you have to change it on different branch for that you have commit it or remove all change

git stash

it will temporarily saves your uncommitted changes and cleans your working directory so you can switch branches safely.

Commit History

To know the history of the commits, we run

git log

This command shows a list of commits in reverse order (newest at the top).

Difference in Commits

Sometimes you don’t want to just see the commit history — you want to see what actually changed between commits. For that, Git gives us the diff command.

git diff

This shows what changed compared to the last commit.

Pull

To pull the latest changes from the git repository

git pull branchname //git pull origin main

Push

To pull the latest changes to the git repository

git push

Merging

To merge the code from one branch to another branch

git merge branchname // this will merge the code from the branchname to your current branch

And yeah, these are some basic commands, will probably add more commands. 😊

Thanks for reading, and see you in the next blog!

Peace ✌️ and Happy Learning!