My Git – Cheat Sheet

This is just a short collection of Git commands and tricks which I personally did not always remember.

Create a new Tag

To create and push a new tag:

1.) List current tags

$ git tag

2.) Create a new Tag

$ git tag -a <TAG-VERSION> -m "next release" 

3.) Push tag

By default, the git push command doesn’t transfer tags to remote servers. You will have to explicitly push tags to a shared server after you have created them.

$ git push origin <TAG-VERSION>

Create a Branch

To list all existing branches:

$ git branch

to create a new local branch

$ git branch <branch>

and checkout it with

$ git checkout <branch>

to push the branch to the remote repo

$ git push origin <branch>

Merge a Branch

Merge another branch into the current (e.g. into the master branch)

List all the branches in your local Git repository using the git branch command:

$ git branch

The output shows all branches and marks the current branch with an *.

Ensure you are on the branch you want to merge into. To switch to the master branch:

$ git checkout master

Now you can start merging. Since merging is a type of commit, it also requires a commit message.

$ git merge -m "Your merge commit message" [source_branch]

Check the result in your current file tree.

Finally push your changes:

$ git push origin

How to resolve Merge Conflicts

Sometime you may forget to pull before you start working on something. Later you can not push your commit directly if a colleague has worked on some other artifacts. In this case you can do pull --rebase. This will resolve the conflict in most cases.

$ git pull --rebase

In any case if your pull produces a merge conflict you still will be warned by git.

Git: pull.rebase

By default, git pull uses a merge strategy. This can cause issues when you try to push your changes while a colleague has already pushed commits to the same branch – even if the changes don’t conflict at all. Your push gets rejected, and you have to manually pull and merge first.

Setting pull.rebase=true changes the behavior of git pull to automatically rebase your local commits on top of the remote changes. This way, a simple git pull followed by git push (or a sync) works seamlessly – no merge conflicts, no unnecessary merge commits.

To enable it globally:

$ git config --global pull.rebase true

This applies to all Git tools – whether you use the terminal, VS Code, Eclipse, or any other IDE.