tags

Hints For Viewing Repo Changes

Git Diff - the command line

Note that the diff’ing methods below only compare commits, that is, changes already committed to the repo. They don’t address contents of your working directory or index. For that use “git diff” (index vs. workspace), or “git diff –staged” (HEAD vs. index).

1. See a given commit’s diffs relative to its parent commit…

In this form of git show, you see ONLY a single commit’s diffs, even if you provide a branch name instead of a sha.

$ git show 3f29a16  # (Not a real commit sha)

git show can be handy whenever you just want to see a single commit’s worth of diffs. You can do this from anywhere–there is no need, for instance, to get your workspace into a clean state, checkout a particular branch, and “git diff”.

1. To view diffs on an entire branch, relative to another branch…

   $ git diff master..sample-solution  # In diff output, master is on the left, sample-solution on the right
   

2. For some branch comparisons, you may want to exclude one or more files from the git diff output. For instance, no need to see the entire jquery file when it’s added to the code base. Also no need to view diffs in the “docs” directory …

   $ git diff master..sample-solution ':(exclude)*jquery*.js' ':(exclude)docs/'
   

More ways to view changes

Look at them on github.com. Navigate to https://github.com/walquis/tags/tree/sample-solution (or visit https://github.com/walquis/tags and choose sample-solution from the branch dropdown). Then click “Contribute”, directly under the green “Code” button, then “Compare”. This will show diffs with respect to master.

Download SourceTree (or another git GUI, such as Github Desktop–but SourceTree is quite good), and point it at your local tags repo.

SourceTree nicely displays the branches that label the changes along the sample-solution branch.

VSCode marketplace has plugins such as Git Graph).

In SourceTree, browse the changes, and explore the options for viewing changes–for instance, highlighting multiple commits with shift-click will show diffs across those commits (so you can, for example, see the sum of changes to get from “empty django web service”, all the way to “hello world!”); also, the file viewer can switch from flat list to tree view; etc.

Your project team will be implementing these changes and delivering to master, but keep in mind that it’s not necessary to use these commits or branches “as-is” or even at all. They are just there as an example of how one might accomplish the task. When your project team gets going, feel free to make use of these branches as little or as much as you please.