5. Tagging and branching

Conclusion and next steps

Congratulations! You've once again mastered committing changes, branching out for new features, and merging those changes back into the main branch. These skills are foundational to any collaborative development project.

In the next chapter, we'll delve into navigating the project's history. But for now...

Quiz time!

Quiz yourself

1/9: How can you refer to a specific commit in Git?

By its full or shortened SHA-1 hash

By a tag name assigned to it

By a branch name pointing to it

By its relative position to HEAD (e.g., HEAD~2)

All of the above

2/9: What is the purpose of tags in Git?

To give human-readable names to important commits

To mark release versions of the project

To easily switch back to a specific state of the project

All of the above

To make the repository look more colorful

3/9: Is every project required to have tags in Git?

Yes, the version history is incomplete without tags

Yes, tags are the easy version of branches

Yes, Linus Torvalds spent too much time implementing tags for us not to use them

4/9: What does the command git log do?

Shows the differences between the staging area and the last commit

Displays the commit history for the current branch

Switches to another branch

Pushes commits to a remote repository

Logs you into your GitHub account

5/9: What do branches allow you to do in Git?

Work on different features or bug fixes without interfering with the main codebase

Experiment with new ideas without affecting the stable version

Collaborate with others on the same project simultaneously

All of the above

6/9: What happens to your working directory when you switch branches?

The files change to match the state of the new branch

The files stay the same as before

The files are deleted

The files are sent to the cloud

The files turn invisible

7/9: Which command is used to merge one branch into another?

git combine

git unite

git join

git merge

git marry

8/9: When does a merge conflict occur in Git?

When there are changes in the same part of a file in both the branches being merged

When trying to merge a branch that has already been deleted

When there are uncommitted changes in the working directory

When the branch being merged has fewer commits than the current branch

When the AI that controls your computer considers the changes politically incorrect

9/9: When should you delete a branch?

When you keep having nightmares about the code you wrote in it

When it has been successfully merged and is no longer needed

When you don't like the name anymore

When it has conflicts with another branch

When it has more than 10 commits

Fantastic work! You've got a solid grasp of branching and tagging in Git. Next up, we'll explore navigating your project's history to track down bugs, revert changes, and more.

Next step

Course preview Gitopedia Blog