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The Power of Git Branches

Branches are a super cool feature in Git that allows you to isolate the work you're doing to avoid issue when working with others, or doing things like upgrade work on the side.

Creating a Branch

Let's try making a branch and get more into the details of what is going on. In your terminal:

git branch cool-file-upgrade

Ok, nothing happened. No feedback? Let's try running git branch and see what it says.

git branch

What we get back is:

  cool-file-upgrade
* master

We should see the branch we made cool-file-upgrade.md but what the heck master come from? master is a branch that Git automatically creates when you first ran git init, this special branch should reflect the latest working code.

Checkout Our Branch

Now that we have our cool-file-upgrade branch created, we need to switch over to it. To do that we will use the command checkout. I like to think of checkout is like checking out a library book, when you run the command, you switch to the

git checkout cool-file-upgrade

Switched to branch 'cool-file-upgrade'

git branch cool-file-upgrade and git checkout cool-file-upgrade are so common that this action has been combined in to git checkout -b cool-file-upgrade

Commtting a Change on a New Branch

Edit cool-file.md

this is an edit

This is an edit on the cool-file-upgrade branch

stage the changes:

git add -p

commit our changes:

git commit -m 'Changing cool-file-upgrade branch'

Confirm everything looks good:

[master 307204c] Cool file master branch edit
 1 file changed, 2 insertion(+), 0 deletion(-)

In our branch any changes we make to current files and new files will be isolated to our branch. This makes it very easy to work with others when they are working on completely separate tasks so they you dont end up clobbering each other.

Using git log to Check our commit History

To help illustrate how commits done on a branch are isolated from other work branches of work, we're going to use git log command.

Try it out:

git log

You should see at least a couple row of information displayed. log displays the history of commits made to your branch, the order is from newest to oldest. At the top we should see the commit we just made. Cool, to exit this view enter q for quit.

Now let's switch to our master branch using the checkout command.

git checkout master

Displays:

Switched to branch 'master'

Let's see the commit history for our master branch using the log command again.

git log

If you look at the latest commit you will see the commit message is from the work we had done before we started work on our cool-file-upgrade branch.

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