Git commands for pair programming
At my work I'm on an agile team and we do pair programming. Here are some git commands I find useful and use almost every day:
We always make sure to branch off the latest main when creating new feature branches:
git checkout main && git pull
git checkout -b new-feature
At the end of the day, if we're not done with the new feature we create a "work in progress" WIP commit:
git add .
git commit -m 'WIP'
And push it up:
git push origin head
* As a rule we don't ever leave work on our development computers overnight.
* If someone is out the next day someone else can pickup that work and continue on.
* Pushing the code triggers a CI build showing any issues with specs as early as possible.
You can also use the feature branch name here:
git push origin new-feature
"head" is easier to remember at the end of the work day, so that's what I always use.
The next day we may find we're pairing with different people.
If I'm driving again then I will reset my feature branch back to before the WIP commit to continue on with development:
git reset head~1
If the other person was driving last I will checkout the branch they WIP'd and then reset the commit:
git checkout main && git pull
git checkout new-feature
git reset head~1
If I already have the branch checked out locally I'll do a hard reset to sync up with the contents of our remote branch:
git reset --hard origin/new-feature
When the development feature branch is complete I will rebase it against main before merging:
git rebase main
If I have more than one commit on the feature branch then I will rebase interactively and squash the commits:
git rebase -i main
Side note: Dash (-) is very useful with git. It means "the last branch I was on". So if I was on my new-feature branch and switched to main and then wanted to switch back I could do:
git checkout -
Finally, when I'm ready to merge my feature branch to main I use --no-ff:
git checkout main
git merge new-feature
This explicitly creates a merge commit.
I could also use dash here since my feature branch was likely the last branch I was on:
git merge -
The git-pair gem is very useful for pair programming:
https://github.com/chrisk/git-pair
It lets you commit as a pair:
git pair gd yc
git add . && git commit -m 'WIP'
A configured .pairs file might look something like this:
pairs:
yc: Yungchih Chen; yunchih.chen
gd: Greg Donald; greg.donald
email:
domain: example.com
Happy pairing!