For Part 2 of our 60-second Git tutorial, we’ll look at some super simple branching and merging.
git branch tells you which branch you’re on.
git branch -a lists all branches, even remote ones.
git checkout mybranch checks out the branch you want.
git checkout -b newbranch creates a new branch from the one you’re on, and checks it out for you.
git checkout master && git merge mybranch merges changes from one branch to your master branch. If you don’t yet want to commit the changes, you can do git merge --no-commit mybranch instead.
So far, we’ve only talked about local git usage. Isn’t it cool that you can do so much without even having a server set up with our repo? I think so.
Part 3 will include pulling and pushing your changes to remote repos.
Update: Yeah, ok, so I never got around to writing part 3. Back when this was written, super simple Git how-tos were less plentiful. Now, we have git-scm.com, Why Git is Better than SVN, and of course GitHub’s help site.