Unfortunately I constantly forget how to do simple tasks, not to speak of complex ones. This post is going to serve as my very own GIT manual so I can make these translations easily and not have to remember the intricacies.

Updating your local repositories with remote changes: git pull

To get the latest changes from your remote repository merged into your local master, run git pull. This is pretty much the same as running git fetch then git merge origin/master. Think of this as the GIT version of svn:update or Vault’s “Get Latest”.

git pull

Pushing local changes to your remote repository

git add 'your file name'  #do this for each file or folder with changes
git commit -a -m 'Your commit message'
git push origin master

Rejected!

If a push to your remote repository gets rejected, it’s probably because remote files have been changed since you last used git pull. Run git pull then git push origin/master again. With any luck you should be in business.

Push master to origin/master

git push origin master
> To git@github.com:<username>/<reponame>.git
>  ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast forward)
> error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:<username>/<reponame>.git'

Damn! Shit’s broke! Pull again then re-try your push!

git pull
> Merge made by recursive.

git push origin master
> Counting objects: 10, done.
> Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
> Writing objects: 100% (6/6), 814 bytes, done.
> Total 6 (delta 1), reused 0 (delta 0)
> To git@github.com:<username>/<reponame>.git
>    65a1527..79239e9  master -> master

It worked!

Updating your fork of another user’s repository

get fetch origin
git fetch upstream
git merge upstream/master
git push origin master

There’s probably an easier way to do that, but I haven’t figured out as of this writing.

Counting the number of commits (and commiters)

git shortlog -s -n

This just gives you a nice clean list. The best I can figure out is to clean it up with some regex and count it.

• Replace all letters and spaces with nothing: [a-z ]+
• Replace new lines with commas
• Wrap the result in array delimiting square brackets
• Count it up with JavaScript

var commits = [744,536,68ö,39,17...1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1];
var count = 0;

commits.forEach(function(x) {
  count += x;
});
console.log(count);

If somebody has a better way, please tell me — this approach is overly complicated.