Intro to git

Block 3.2: Synchronizing Changes

Jan Simson

Syncing Changes: Overview

You first pull the latest changes from the remote and then push your own changes

Getting Changes: git pull

• You can retrieve the latest changes from github by running git pull
• This fetches the latest changes and merges them into your current branch
• Typically your local branch is set up to track a remote branch with the same name (the upstream)
  • If not, you get a warning from git

# Pull from the tracked remote branch
git pull

# Pull from a specific branch
git pull <remote> <branch>

Getting Changes: git pull

• This fetches the latest changes and merges them into your current branch
  • git pull really does two things here
• You can also run git fetch to fetch the latest changes and then git merge <remote>/branch to merge them
• git fetch will always fetch the latest changes without doing anything with them (which can be useful)

Pushing Your Changes: git push

• You can send your changes to github by running git push
• This only works if there are no new changes at the remote
  • If there have been changes since your last pull you need to pull again

# Push to the tracked remote branch
git push

# Push a branch to the remote for the first time
# -u is short for --set-upstream
git push -u <remote> <branch>

Questions?

Practical: Adding your own repository to Github

1. Create a new repository on GitHub with the name git-intro-example
   • Make sure NOT to add a README or any other file when creating it
2. In the example git repository we’ve been working in so far, add the just created GitHub repo as a remote
   • git remote add origin <URL>
3. Push you changes so far to GitHub
   • git push -u origin main

Optional Practical: Collaboration

1. Form pairs
2. One person adds the other to their git-intro-example repository
   • Via the GitHub UI (write privileges)
3. Each, add a new entry to the library.txt
4. Try to provoke a merge conflict

End of Section 🎉

Any Questions?

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