Daily Archives: 22 March 2017

git: How to move locally committed (but not pushed) changes to a new branch 2

 in Applications  tagged branch / commit / git / push by

Recently, we’ve been working on a certain branch, we did some changes and performed a couple of commits that were not pushed on the remote system.

There was a complication and it was decided that the local changes should not be pushed to the branch that we were working on.
Rather, they changes should go to a new branch which eventually will be merged.

As mentioned above, we already had done some changes and we already had performed the commits.

git status would give us the following:

$ git status;
On branch scanner_pdu_parser_master
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/scanner_pdu_parser_master' by 2 commits.
  (use "git push" to publish your local commits)

So, we needed to change the branch for those local commits.

Solution – Move the local commits to a new branch

First we got the name of the current branch using the command:

git branch;

Then, we switched to a new local branch

git checkout -b banana_peeler;

And, we pushed the local branch to the remote system:

git push --set-upstream origin banana_peeler;

Afterwards, we switched back to the previous branch

git checkout apple_peeler;

And reset it back to its original form, removing our local commits from it:

git reset --hard origin/apple_peeler;

Please note that the last command will delete all changes that are not committed as well.
In other words, any file you modified and did not commit or push, they will be reverted back to the original code as well.

Using aliases for SSH

 in Applications  tagged alias / ssh by

An extremely helpful feature of ssh is the ability to define aliases using its configuration files:

  • ~/.ssh/config
  • /etc/ssh/ssh_config

~/.ssh/config contains configuration that is only available to your user and any user can create one for themselves.
/etc/ssh/ssh_config contains configuration that applies to all users of the system and only administrators can modify it.

Note: ~/.ssh/config should only have read and write access rights by its owner only!
Be sure to execute the following after your create it:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config;

Example 1 – Creating an alias for a host name:

Assuming we are too bored to type the full domain of a server, we can define a shorter name as follows:

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net

by having this configuration lines in your ~/.ssh/config file, you can shorten the command ssh bytefreaks.net; to ssh bf;.

Example 2 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username:

In the next example, we create a new alias that not only will automatically set the host name but also the username

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george

by having this configuration lines in your ~/.ssh/config file, you shorten the command ssh [email protected]; to ssh bf;.

Example 3 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username and port:

In the next example, we create a new alias for a specific host name, username and ssh port number

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george
    Port 22300

The above will shorten ssh [email protected] -p 22300 to ssh bf;.

Example 4 – Creating an alias for a host name with specific username and identity file:

Host bf
    HostName bytefreaks.net
    User george
    IdentityFile /path/to/needed/private/key/id_rsa

The above will shorten ssh [email protected] -i /path/to/needed/private/key/id_rsa; to ssh bf;

For more information on the capabilities of the configuration files, please review the following documentation page as it has a whole lot more of useful information: http://man.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi/OpenBSD-current/man5/ssh_config.5

Repeated note: ~/.ssh/config should only have read and write access rights by its owner only!
Be sure to execute the following after your create it:

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config;