Git Recipes
2025-05-29, Thu
Everybody seems to to have their own Git recipes. This post is yet another one that record solution to common problems I have encountered while using Git.
1. Git on Windows
The reason why I even bother Windows is because my current employer demands it, along with following problems when neither WSL nor Cygwin is available.
First, to store credential so that we don't need to input username and
password every time git pull is called1:
git config --global credential.helper store
Second, in order to accommodate long file paths, we need to adjust the
value of core.longpaths as well2:
git config --system core.longpaths true
Then comes this file mode problem I have encountered the other day:
some files with permission of 755 have been changed to 644, which
results into git status reporting them without actual content
difference. To ignore mere permission udpate, run3:
git config core.fileMode false
Another common warning that shows up is this "LF will be replaced by
CRLF" message, which could be dealt with4 through:
git config core.autocrlf true
2. Large File Storage
Git LFS5 introduces .gitattribute and stores files that
are not text into dedicated large file storage, such as JAR, ZIP,
PDF, PNG, MP4 files, etc. The problem is when we download source
from remote repository as ZIP file (instead of git clone the whole
repository), those files are all empty. In this case, use git lfs to
manually retrieve the actual files' content6:
git lfs fetch --all git lfs checkout
Other recipes will be added when new problems are encountered.
3. Rewrite Branch History
When the time comes to re-write the commit history of a branch, it's often caused by the necessity to select, correct or remove some commit. In either case, the steps typically boil down to
- Create a new base branch, i.e.
git branch base-branch-name <commit-hash>, and - Rebase current branch to this new base, i.e.
git rebase <base-branch-name>
A typical example looks like this7, 8:
git checkout branch-that-needs-clean-up git branch base-to-start-anew HEAD^5 git rebase base-to-start-anew # or git rebase --interactive base-to-start-anew # followed by the detailed instructions on how to handle each commit git rebase --continue git rebase --abort git commit -m "fresh commit message" git push --force-with-lease
4. Multiple Remote Origins To a Single Repo
There are two approaches to get this done: push to multiple URLs with one command, use separate remote names. The first approach could be done like this:
git remote add origin <URL-1> git remote set-url --add --push origin <URL-2> # verify the multiple-push config git remote -v
This configuration pulls only from the primary URL, but pushes to multiple servers at once.
The second approach applies when we want to pull or push to different remote servers independently.
git remote add origin <URL-1> git remote add backup <URL-2> # now push to different remote servers git push origin main git push backup main
More infos could be found in "Git Basics - Working with Remotes"9.
5. GitHub Recipes
5.1. Add SSH key to multiple accounts
GitHub typically allows one public key being used for only one account. If we need to connect to multiple accounts at the same time, a simple solution is to generate multiple key pairs. e.g.
ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "some_new_mail@example.com" -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_some_new_name"
Now we can used the new ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_some_new_name.pub in GitHub.