Hacktoberfest has already started!! Have you made any contributions yet??

What is Hacktoberfest ? It is not an Anonymous hacking anniversary, but a global event with the main goal to raise awareness about Open Source and encourage as many developers as possible to participate regularly, not just in October.

For participating in hacktoberfest, knowledge of Git and GitHub is a must. But I think are you facing difficulties with Git CLI commands??

In case you're quite new to git, I will try to explain in a simple way how to use the basic commands you absolutely need to contribute to Open Source.

Disclaimer: This tutorial is meant for beginners. I will oversimplify a little bit to make sure the concepts can be easily understood by someone who might have never used git or has little experience.

No worries you will be able to understand all the commands! Let's deep dive into it.

git config --global user.name “[firstname lastname]” --> set a name that is identifiable for credit when reviewing version history

git config --global user.email “[valid-email]” --> set an email address that will be associated with each history marker

git init --> initialize an existing directory as a Git repository

git clone [url] --> retrieve an entire repository from a hosted location via URL

git status --> show modified files in the working directory, staged for your next commit

git add [file] --> add a file as it looks now to your next commit (stage)

git commit -m “[descriptive message]” --> commit your staged content as a new commit snapshot

git branch --> list your branches. a will appear next to the currently active branch*

git log --> show all commits in the current branch’s history

git rm [file] --> delete the file from project and stage the removal for commit

git merge [alias]/[branch] --> merge a remote branch into your current branch to bring it up to date

Here I have just mentioned some of the commands you need to know to get started with GIT and GitHub.

Technically, you could do some of these steps even without commands in the terminal but with a GUI (Graphical User Interface) such as GitHub Desktop or Sourcetree, however since git is such a widespread and useful tool you're gonna use every day, you must know at least the basics.

If you want to see how these commands can be used in a real case, you can watch this video which I uploaded on my Youtube Channel where I explained complete Git and GitHub from scratch!

Thanks for reading this post, I hope you found it interesting!

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