GITFAQ(7)

NAME
gitfaq - Frequently asked questions about using Git

SYNOPSIS

gitfaq

DESCRIPTION

The examples in this FAQ assume a standard POSIX shell, like bash or dash, and a user, A U Thor, who has the account author on the hosting provider git.example.org.

CONFIGURATION

What should I put in user.name?
    You should put your personal name, generally a form using a given name and family name. For example, the current maintainer of Git uses "Junio C Hamano". This will be the name portion that is stored in every commit you make.

    This configuration doesn’t have any effect on authenticating to remote services; for that, see credential.username in git-config(1).

What does http.postBuffer really do?
    This option changes the size of the buffer that Git uses when pushing data to a remote over HTTP or HTTPS. If the data is larger than this size, libcurl, which handles the HTTP support for Git, will use chunked transfer encoding since it isn’t known ahead of time what the size of the pushed data will be.

    Leaving this value at the default size is fine unless you know that either the remote server or a proxy in the middle doesn’t support HTTP/1.1 (which introduced the chunked transfer encoding) or is known to be broken with chunked data. This is often (erroneously) suggested as a solution for generic push problems, but since almost every server and proxy supports at least HTTP/1.1, raising this value usually doesn’t solve most push problems. A server or proxy that didn’t correctly support HTTP/1.1 and chunked transfer encoding wouldn’t be that useful on the Internet today, since it would break lots of traffic.

    Note that increasing this value will increase the memory used on every relevant push that Git does over HTTP or HTTPS, since the entire buffer is allocated regardless of whether or not it is all used. Thus, it’s best to leave it at the default unless you are sure you need a different value.

How do I configure a different editor?
    If you haven’t specified an editor specifically for Git, it will by default use the editor you’ve configured using the VISUAL or EDITOR environment variables, or if neither is specified, the system default (which is usually vi). Since some people find vi difficult to use or prefer a different editor, it may be desirable to change the editor used.

    If you want to configure a general editor for most programs which need one, you can edit your shell configuration (e.g., ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshenv) to contain a line setting the EDITOR or VISUAL environment variable to an appropriate value. For example, if you prefer the editor nano, then you could write the following:

        export VISUAL=nano

    If you want to configure an editor specifically for Git, you can either set the core.editor configuration value or the GIT_EDITOR environment variable. You can see git-var(1) for details on the order in which these options are consulted.

    Note that in all cases, the editor value will be passed to the shell, so any arguments containing spaces should be appropriately quoted. Additionally, if your editor normally detaches from the terminal when invoked, you should specify it with an argument that makes it not do that, or else Git will not see any changes. An example of a configuration addressing both of these issues on Windows would be the configuration "C:\Program Files\Vim\gvim.exe" --nofork, which quotes the filename with spaces and specifies the --nofork option to avoid backgrounding the process.

Why not have commit.signoff and other configuration variables?
    Git intentionally does not (and will not) provide a configuration variable, such as commit.signoff, to automatically add --signoff by default. The reason is to protect the legal and intentional significance of a sign-off. If there were more automated and widely publicized ways for sign-offs to be appended, it would become easier for someone to argue later that a "Signed-off-by" trailer was just added out of habit or by automation, without the committer’s full awareness or intent to certify their agreement with the Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) or a similar statement. This could undermine the sign-off’s credibility in legal or contractual situations.

    There exists format.signoff, but that is a historical mistake, and it is not an excuse to add more mistakes of the same kind on top.

CREDENTIALS

How do I specify my credentials when pushing over HTTP?
    The easiest way to do this is to use a credential helper via the credential.helper configuration. Most systems provide a standard choice to integrate with the system credential manager. For example, Git for Windows provides the wincred credential manager, macOS has the osxkeychain credential manager, and Unix systems with a standard desktop environment can use the libsecret credential manager. All of these store credentials in an encrypted store to keep your passwords or tokens secure.

    In addition, you can use the store credential manager which stores in a file in your home directory, or the cache credential manager, which does not permanently store your credentials, but does prevent you from being prompted for them for a certain period of time.

    You can also just enter your password when prompted. While it is possible to place the password (which must be percent-encoded) in the URL, this is not particularly secure and can lead to accidental exposure of credentials, so it is not recommended.

How do I read a password or token from an environment variable?
    The credential.helper configuration option can also take an arbitrary shell command that produces the credential protocol on standard output. This is useful when passing credentials into a container, for example.

    Such a shell command can be specified by starting the option value with an exclamation point. If your password or token were stored in the GIT_TOKEN, you could run the following command to set your credential helper:

        $ git config credential.helper \
                '!f() { echo username=author; echo "password=$GIT_TOKEN"; };f'

How do I change the password or token I’ve saved in my credential manager?
    Usually, if the password or token is invalid, Git will erase it and prompt for a new one. However, there are times when this doesn’t always happen. To change the password or token, you can erase the existing credentials and then Git will prompt for new ones. To erase credentials, use a syntax like the following (substituting your username and the hostname):

        $ echo url=https://author@git.example.org | git credential reject

How do I use multiple accounts with the same hosting provider using HTTP?
    Usually the easiest way to distinguish between these accounts is to use the username in the URL. For example, if you have the accounts author and committer on git.example.org, you can use the URLs https://author@git.example.org/org1/project1.git and https://committer@git.example.org/org2/project2.git. This way, when you use a credential helper, it will automatically try to look up the correct credentials for your account. If you already have a remote set up, you can change the URL with something like git remote set-url origin https://author@git.example.org/org1/project1.git (see git-remote(1) for details).

How do I use multiple accounts with the same hosting provider using SSH?
    With most hosting providers that support SSH, a single key pair uniquely identifies a user. Therefore, to use multiple accounts, it’s necessary to create a key pair for each account. If you’re using a reasonably modern OpenSSH version, you can create a new key pair with something like ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -f ~/.ssh/id_committer. You can then register the public key (in this case, ~/.ssh/id_committer.pub; note the .pub) with the hosting provider.

    Most hosting providers use a single SSH account for pushing; that is, all users push to the git account (e.g., git@git.example.org). If that’s the case for your provider, you can set up multiple aliases in SSH to make it clear which key pair to use. For example, you could write something like the following in ~/.ssh/config, substituting the proper private key file:

        # This is the account for author on git.example.org.
        Host example_author
                HostName git.example.org
                User git
                # This is the key pair registered for author with git.example.org.
                IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_author
                IdentitiesOnly yes
        # This is the account for committer on git.example.org.
        Host example_committer
                HostName git.example.org
                User git
                # This is the key pair registered for committer with git.example.org.
                IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_committer
                IdentitiesOnly yes

    Then, you can adjust your push URL to use git@example_author or git@example_committer instead of git@example.org (e.g., git remote set-url git@example_author:org1/project1.git).

TRANSFERS

How do I sync a working tree across systems?
    First, decide whether you want to do this at all. Git works best when you push or pull your work using the typical git push and git fetch commands and isn’t designed to share a working tree across systems. This is potentially risky and in some cases can cause repository corruption or data loss.

    Usually, doing so will cause git status to need to re-read every file in the working tree. Additionally, Git’s security model does not permit sharing a working tree across untrusted users, so it is only safe to sync a working tree if it will only be used by a single user across all machines.

    It is important not to use a cloud syncing service to sync any portion of a Git repository, since this can cause corruption, such as missing objects, changed or added files, broken refs, and a wide variety of other problems. These services tend to sync file by file on a continuous basis and don’t understand the structure of a Git repository. This is especially bad if they sync the repository in the middle of it being updated, since that is very likely to cause incomplete or partial updates and therefore data loss.

    An example of the kind of corruption that can occur is conflicts over the state of refs, such that both sides end up with different commits on a branch that the other doesn’t have. This can result in important objects becoming unreferenced and possibly pruned by git gc, causing data loss.

    Therefore, it’s better to push your work to either the other system or a central server using the normal push and pull mechanism. In Git 2.51, Git learned to import and export stashes, so it’s possible to synchronize the state of the working tree by stashing it with git stash, then exporting either all stashes with git stash export --to-ref refs/heads/stashes (assuming you want to export to the stashes branch) or selecting stashes by adding their numbers to the end of that command. It’s also possible to include untracked files by using the --include-untracked argument when stashing the data in the first place, but be careful not to do this if any of these contain sensitive information.

    You can then push the stashes branch (or whatever branch you’ve exported to), fetch them to the local system (such as with git fetch origin +stashes:stashes), and import the stashes on the other system with git stash import stashes (again, changing the name as necessary). Applying the changes to the working tree can be done with git stash pop or git stash apply. This is the approach that is most robust and most likely to avoid unintended problems.

    Having said that, there are some cases where people nevertheless prefer to share a working tree across systems. If you do this, the recommended approach is to use rsync -a --delete-after (ideally with an encrypted connection such as with ssh) on the root of repository. You should ensure several things when you do this:

        • If you have additional worktrees or a separate Git directory, they must be synced at the same time as the main working tree and repository.

        • You are comfortable with the destination directory being an exact copy of the source directory, deleting any data that is already there.

        • The repository (including all worktrees and the Git directory) is in a quiescent state for the duration of the transfer (that is, no operations of any sort are taking place on it, including background operations like git gc and operations invoked by your editor).

        Be aware that even with these recommendations, syncing working trees in this way has some risk since it bypasses Git’s normal integrity checking for repositories, so having backups is advised. You may also wish to do a git fsck to verify the integrity of your data on the destination system after syncing.

COMMON ISSUES

I’ve made a mistake in the last commit. How do I change it?
    You can make the appropriate change to your working tree, run git add <file> or git rm <file>, as appropriate, to stage it, and then git commit --amend. Your change will be included in the commit, and you’ll be prompted to edit the commit message again; if you wish to use the original message verbatim, you can use the --no-edit option to git commit in addition, or just save and quit when your editor opens.

I’ve made a change with a bug and it’s been included in the main branch. How should I undo it?
    The usual way to deal with this is to use git revert. This preserves the history that the original change was made and was a valuable contribution, but also introduces a new commit that undoes those changes because the original had a problem. The commit message of the revert indicates the commit which was reverted and is usually edited to include an explanation as to why the revert was made.

How do I ignore changes to a tracked file?
    Git doesn’t provide a way to do this. The reason is that if Git needs to overwrite this file, such as during a checkout, it doesn’t know whether the changes to the file are precious and should be kept, or whether they are irrelevant and can safely be destroyed. Therefore, it has to take the safe route and always preserve them.

    It’s tempting to try to use certain features of git update-index, namely the assume-unchanged and skip-worktree bits, but these don’t work properly for this purpose and shouldn’t be used this way.

    If your goal is to modify a configuration file, it can often be helpful to have a file checked into the repository which is a template or set of defaults which can then be copied alongside and modified as appropriate. This second, modified file is usually ignored to prevent accidentally committing it.

I asked Git to ignore various files, yet they are still tracked
    A gitignore file ensures that certain file(s) which are not tracked by Git remain untracked. However, sometimes particular file(s) may have been tracked before adding them into the .gitignore, hence they still remain tracked. To untrack and ignore files/patterns, use git rm --cached <file/pattern> and add a pattern to .gitignore that matches the <file>. See gitignore(5) for details.

How do I know if I want to do a fetch or a pull?
    A fetch stores a copy of the latest changes from the remote repository, without modifying the working tree or current branch. You can then at your leisure inspect, merge, rebase on top of, or ignore the upstream changes. A pull consists of a fetch followed immediately by either a merge or rebase. See git-pull(1).

Can I use a proxy with Git?
    Yes, Git supports the use of proxies. Git honors the standard http_proxy, https_proxy, and no_proxy environment variables commonly used on Unix, and it also can be configured with http.proxy and similar options for HTTPS (see git-config(1)). The http.proxy and related options can be customized on a per-URL pattern basis. In addition, Git can in theory function normally with transparent proxies that exist on the network.

    For SSH, Git can support a proxy using OpenSSH’s ProxyCommand. Commonly used tools include netcat and socat. However, they must be configured not to exit when seeing EOF on standard input, which usually means that netcat will require -q and socat will require a timeout with something like -t 10. This is required because the way the Git SSH server knows that no more requests will be made is an EOF on standard input, but when that happens, the server may not have yet processed the final request, so dropping the connection at that point would interrupt that request.

    An example configuration entry in ~/.ssh/config with an HTTP proxy might look like this:

        Host git.example.org
            User git
            ProxyCommand socat -t 10 - PROXY:proxy.example.org:%h:%p,proxyport=8080

    Note that in all cases, for Git to work properly, the proxy must be completely transparent. The proxy cannot modify, tamper with, or buffer the connection in any way, or Git will almost certainly fail to work. Note that many proxies, including many TLS middleboxes, Windows antivirus and firewall programs other than Windows Defender and Windows Firewall, and filtering proxies fail to meet this standard, and as a result end up breaking Git. Because of the many reports of problems and their poor security history, we recommend against the use of these classes of software and devices.

MERGING AND REBASING

What kinds of problems can occur when merging long-lived branches with squash merges?
    In general, there are a variety of problems that can occur when using squash merges to merge two branches multiple times. These can include seeing extra commits in git log output, with a GUI, or when using the ... notation to express a range, as well as the possibility of needing to re-resolve conflicts again and again.

    When Git does a normal merge between two branches, it considers exactly three points: the two branches and a third commit, called the merge base, which is usually the common ancestor of the commits. The result of the merge is the sum of the changes between the merge base and each head. When you merge two branches with a regular merge commit, this results in a new commit which will end up as a merge base when they’re merged again, because there is now a new common ancestor. Git doesn’t have to consider changes that occurred before the merge base, so you don’t have to re-resolve any conflicts you resolved before.

    When you perform a squash merge, a merge commit isn’t created; instead, the changes from one side are applied as a regular commit to the other side. This means that the merge base for these branches won’t have changed, and so when Git goes to perform its next merge, it considers all of the changes that it considered the last time plus the new changes. That means any conflicts may need to be re-resolved. Similarly, anything using the ... notation in git diff, git log, or a GUI will result in showing all of the changes since the original merge base.

    As a consequence, if you want to merge two long-lived branches repeatedly, it’s best to always use a regular merge commit.

If I make a change on two branches but revert it on one, why does the merge of those branches include the change?
    By default, when Git does a merge, it uses a strategy called the ort strategy, which does a fancy three-way merge. In such a case, when Git performs the merge, it considers exactly three points: the two heads and a third point, called the merge base, which is usually the common ancestor of those commits. Git does not consider the history or the individual commits that have happened on those branches at all.

    As a result, if both sides have a change and one side has reverted that change, the result is to include the change. This is because the code has changed on one side and there is no net change on the other, and in this scenario, Git adopts the change.

    If this is a problem for you, you can do a rebase instead, rebasing the branch with the revert onto the other branch. A rebase in this scenario will revert the change, because a rebase applies each individual commit, including the revert. Note that rebases rewrite history, so you should avoid rebasing published branches unless you’re sure you’re comfortable with that. See the NOTES section in git-rebase(1) for more details.

HOOKS

How do I use hooks to prevent users from making certain changes?
    The only safe place to make these changes is on the remote repository (i.e., the Git server), usually in the pre-receive hook or in a continuous integration (CI) system. These are the locations in which policy can be enforced effectively.

    It’s common to try to use pre-commit hooks (or, for commit messages, commit-msg hooks) to check these things, which is great if you’re working as a solo developer and want the tooling to help you. However, using hooks on a developer machine is not effective as a policy control because a user can bypass these hooks with --no-verify without being noticed (among various other ways). Git assumes that the user is in control of their local repositories and doesn’t try to prevent this or tattle on the user.

    In addition, some advanced users find pre-commit hooks to be an impediment to workflows that use temporary commits to stage work in progress or that create fixup commits, so it’s better to push these kinds of checks to the server anyway.

CROSS-PLATFORM ISSUES

I’m on Windows and my text files are detected as binary.
    Git works best when you store text files as UTF-8. Many programs on Windows support UTF-8, but some do not and only use the little-endian UTF-16 format, which Git detects as binary. If you can’t use UTF-8 with your programs, you can specify a working tree encoding that indicates which encoding your files should be checked out with, while still storing these files as UTF-8 in the repository. This allows tools like git-diff(1) to work as expected, while still allowing your tools to work.

    To do so, you can specify a gitattributes(5) pattern with the working-tree-encoding attribute. For example, the following pattern sets all C files to use UTF-16LE-BOM, which is a common encoding on Windows:

        *.c     working-tree-encoding=UTF-16LE-BOM

    You will need to run git add --renormalize to have this take effect. Note that if you are making these changes on a project that is used across platforms, you’ll probably want to make it in a per-user configuration file or in the one in $GIT_DIR/info/attributes, since making it in a .gitattributes file in the repository will apply to all users of the repository.

    See the following entry for information about normalizing line endings as well, and see gitattributes(5) for more information about attribute files.

I’m on Windows and git diff shows my files as having a ^M at the end.
    By default, Git expects files to be stored with Unix line endings. As such, the carriage return (^M) that is part of a Windows line ending is shown because it is considered to be trailing whitespace. Git defaults to showing trailing whitespace only on new lines, not existing ones.

    You can store the files in the repository with Unix line endings and convert them automatically to your platform’s line endings. To do that, set the configuration option core.eol to native and see the question on recommended storage settings for information about how to configure files as text or binary.

    You can also control this behavior with the core.whitespace setting if you don’t wish to remove the carriage returns from your line endings.

Why do I have a file that’s always modified?
    Internally, Git always stores file names as sequences of bytes and doesn’t perform any encoding or case folding. However, Windows and macOS by default both perform case folding on file names. As a result, it’s possible to end up with multiple files or directories whose names differ only in case. Git can handle this just fine, but the file system can store only one of these files, so when Git reads the other file to see its contents, it looks modified.

    It’s best to remove one of the files such that you only have one file. You can do this with commands like the following (assuming two files AFile.txt and afile.txt) on an otherwise clean working tree:

        $ git rm --cached AFile.txt
        $ git commit -m 'Remove files conflicting in case'
        $ git checkout .

    This avoids touching the disk, but removes the additional file. Your project may prefer to adopt a naming convention, such as all-lowercase names, to avoid this problem from occurring again; such a convention can be checked using a pre-receive hook or as part of a continuous integration (CI) system.

    It is also possible for perpetually modified files to occur on any platform if a smudge or clean filter is in use on your system but a file was previously committed without running the smudge or clean filter. To fix this, run the following on an otherwise clean working tree:

        $ git add --renormalize .

What’s the recommended way to store files in Git?
    While Git can store and handle any file of any type, there are some settings that work better than others. In general, we recommend that text files be stored in UTF-8 without a byte-order mark (BOM) with LF (Unix-style) endings. We also recommend the use of UTF-8 (again, without BOM) in commit messages. These are the settings that work best across platforms and with tools such as git diff and git merge.

    Additionally, if you have a choice between storage formats that are text based or non-text based, we recommend storing files in the text format and, if necessary, transforming them into the other format. For example, a text-based SQL dump with one record per line will work much better for diffing and merging than an actual database file. Similarly, text-based formats such as Markdown and AsciiDoc will work better than binary formats such as Microsoft Word and PDF.

    Similarly, storing binary dependencies (e.g., shared libraries or JAR files) or build products in the repository is generally not recommended. Dependencies and build products are best stored on an artifact or package server with only references, URLs, and hashes stored in the repository.

    We also recommend setting a gitattributes(5) file to explicitly mark which files are text and which are binary. If you want Git to guess, you can set the attribute text=auto.

    With text files, Git will generally ensure that LF endings are used in the repository. The core.autocrlf and core.eol configuration variables specify what line-ending convention is followed when any text file is checked out. You can also use the eol attribute (e.g., eol=crlf) to override which files get what line-ending treatment.

    For example, generally shell files must have LF endings and batch files must have CRLF endings, so the following might be appropriate in some projects:

        # By default, guess.
        *       text=auto
        # Mark all C files as text.
        *.c     text
        # Ensure all shell files have LF endings and all batch files have CRLF
        # endings in the working tree and both have LF in the repo.
        *.sh text eol=lf
        *.bat text eol=crlf
        # Mark all JPEG files as binary.
        *.jpg   binary

    These settings help tools pick the right format for output such as patches and result in files being checked out in the appropriate line ending for the platform.

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite