Welcome to the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Today we’re looking at ?? Git Cheatsheet.

This is a quick reference for the essential Git commands you’ll use day to day at NZRT. Whether you’re just getting started or need a reminder, let’s walk through the key areas together.

First up, setup and configuration. Before using Git on a new machine, you need to tell it who you are. You set your global username and email address — these get attached to every commit you make. Once that’s done, you can view all your configuration settings with a list command. When you’re ready to start a project, you either initialise a new repository from scratch, or clone an existing one from a URL.

Next, the basic daily workflow. You check the status of your working tree to see which files are modified, staged, or untracked. Then you stage the files you want in your next commit — either one at a time, or all changes at once. Once staged, you commit with a message describing what you did. After that, you push your commits up to the remote, and pull down changes your teammates have made.

Branching is how you work on features or fixes without touching the main codebase. You can list your local branches, or all branches including remote ones. You can create a branch and switch to it in one step, or do them separately. When you’re done, you delete it safely — Git warns you if it hasn’t been merged — or force delete if you’re sure. You can also delete a branch from the remote server directly.

For history and inspection, you can view the full commit log or a compact one-line version. You can limit it to the last ten commits, or filter by a specific file. You can show the details of any individual commit, see what’s changed but not yet staged, what’s staged and ready to commit, and even see who changed each line of a file — that last one is called blame.

Merging and rebasing are how you bring branches together. A regular merge combines another branch into your current one. A squash merge does the same but collapses all the incoming commits into a single one, keeping history tidy. Rebasing replays your commits on top of another branch for a clean linear history. Interactive rebase lets you edit, squash, or reorder your recent commits. And if a merge goes wrong mid-way, you can abort it and get back to where you started.

Undoing changes — you’ll need this sooner or later. You can discard changes to a specific file, unstage something you accidentally added, or throw away all local changes with a hard reset back to your last commit. If you need to undo a commit that’s already been pushed, revert is the safe option — it creates a new commit that cancels the old one out. You can also clean out untracked files and directories when your working directory gets messy.

Stashing is your save point for work in progress. If you need to switch context without committing half-finished work, you stash your changes and they’re set aside safely. You can list all your stashes, restore the most recent one with pop, or apply a specific stash by its index number. When you’re done with a stash, you drop it.

Tags and releases give you named markers in your commit history. You can list existing tags, create a lightweight one, or create an annotated tag with a message — annotated tags are the better choice for marking releases. You can push a specific tag to the remote, or push all tags at once.

Remote management covers your connections to remote repositories. You can list your remotes and their URLs, add a new remote, or remove one. Fetch downloads changes from the remote without merging them — handy when you want to inspect before integrating. Fetch with prune also cleans up any remote branches that have been deleted on the server.

And finally, a few advanced commands worth knowing. Cherry-pick lets you apply one specific commit from another branch onto your current one — great for pulling in a single fix. Bisect helps you hunt down which commit introduced a bug by doing a binary search through your history. Reflog shows you a log of everywhere your HEAD has pointed — it’s your safety net when something goes wrong and you need to recover. And filter-branch can rewrite commit history entirely, but that one should be used carefully and deliberately.

That covers the full Git cheatsheet — from first-time setup through to recovery tools for tricky situations.

That’s it for this episode of the NZRT Wiki Podcast. Thanks for listening.