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Git and GitHub for Public Health

10 Daily Git Practice

Use these instructions each day you are working in your repository for good practice!

  1. Open Terminal (Mac) or Bash (Windows). Navigate to your repository using cd.
  2. When you get to your directory, type git branch to remind yourself which branch you are on as you main be on a branch from the previous work day. Type git status to ensure you committed and pushed everything the last time you used Git and GitHub. If there is nothing to commit, go to the next step. If there are files with changes to be committed, you will need to figure out if you want to commit those changes or if you want to discard them. If you want to discard them, type git restore {file-name} to discard changes to that file. Do this for all files until you have a clean directory if you are sure you don’t want to track those changes. If you want to commit them, follow steps 10 through 19 before proceeding to Step 2.
  3. Type git checkout main.
  4. Type git pull origin main. This will pull the changes you made the day before and get you ready to start on a clean branch today.
  5. Delete the previous day’s branch. Type git branch -d {branch-name}. Remember to replace {branch-name} with your previous day’s branch name. If you don’t remember what it was named, type git branch to display a list of all the branches you have.
  6. Create and checkout a new branch by typing git checkout -b {new-branch-name}. Replace the {new-branch-name} with a new branch name. This may be something like {your-initials_date}.
  7. Do your work. Try to perform “your work” as a discrete task that you can summarize with one commit message. If you have more to do, then make multiple commits in one day.
  8. Once you are done, go back to Terminal/Bash (where you should already be in your repository directory) type git status to see which files have been modified and should be staged for a commit. You may have some untracked files that you created and also want to track.
  9. Add your newly added and modified files to the staging area by typing git add {file-names}. You can add all the files that you edited/created.
  10. Commit your changes by typing git commit -m "{commit-message}". Replace {commit-message} with your commit message (don’t forget to keep the quotes around the message)!
  11. Remind yourself of your branch’s name by typing git branch. Then push your changes to the remote repository by typing git push origin {new-branch-name}. Replace {new-branch-name} with your new branch name.
  12. In a browser, go to your repository on GitHub.
  13. If this is the first time you committed to this branch, there should be a yellow banner on your GitHub home page with a “pull request” button. If not, you can navigate to the Code tab, change to your branch, and you will see the code that you just worked on! It is now up on GitHub!
  14. Click on the Pull requests tab.
  15. Click on the green New pull request button.
  16. Click on the green Create pull request button.
  17. Click on the green Merge pull request button.
  18. Click on the green Confirm merge button.
  19. Delete your branch on GitHub when prompted.
  20. You are now ready to do this all over the next day!