I Love Git Extras

The other day, I was wondering why I can't ignore files in git from the the command line. Unlike some of my co-workers, I don't like using GUI apps for everything, but I still like a little but of automation or simplification on the command line. Do I really need to open .gitignore and add some files or patterns to it? No thanks. Then I googled a bit, and I found git-extras. I found the motherlode of git awesomeness.

Reading the README was almost like reading the first Harry Potter book for the first time. I was all smiles, re-reading all sorts of things, and texting my friends, telling them that I had no idea what I'd been missing. I highly encourage you to go through it, but I'll share some of my favorite features.

Merge Into

When we work with our QA server, we're constantly merging the develop or one of our feature branches into QA to see how it fares in a production environment, and to share with our CEO some of our progress. That deployment gets some serious play in marketing meetings. So I commit, I checkout the qa branch, I merge develop into qa, I push, then I switch back to develop. Want to know how I do it now? From whatever branch I'm on, git merge-into qa. It does all of that and switches back to the branch I'm on. Then I can just use my ops_tasks gem to initiate a one-liner deploy to the staging server via AWS OpsWorks.

Git Ignore

This one speaks for itself. Just say git ignore config/application.yml and BOOM. It doesn't mess up the file, it doesn't create a duplicate entry if it already exists (because let's face it, Figaro already takes care of this for you), and it's in there. It just works, and I love it.

Git Touch

So you want to create a new file, and then add it immediately. Don't you hate when you commit but you forgot to add? I do it. You might not do it. I don't care. Running git touch README.md will create the file and automatically add it to the repo. Now it's there.

Git Obliterate

A certain co-worker of mine committed our AWS secrets to a public github project. Within seconds, a malicious bot scooped that right up, and fired up tons of expensive machines to start mining bitcoin or litecoin or something stupid. Embarrassingly enough for them, they didn't use a machine with a GPU, so my guess is, it didn't get them that rich. One time I committed a database password to a personal project. One time I commited the password I use for everything to a personal project. This is why I use 1Password. True story. Now I have randomly generated passwords for everything. But I digress.

Git Obliterate. You run git obliterate file_you_shouldnt_have_commited.yml just once, and it's gone from the entire git history. I also could have used this when I commited a 2GB seed file. But I have it now, and it's wonderful.