5. Git Gotchas

It’s no secret that git is an incredibly powerful tool, but it also comes with some potential gotchas if you’re not careful.

Git will (try to) do whatever you ask it to do, no questions asked
Be careful when running git commands, especially if you’re running commands you found online that you’re not 100% sure about

Running git reset --hard will discard all uncommitted changes in your project
This command cannot be undone, so ensure you really, really want to get rid of all changes before running it.

What It Does
- git push --force overrides the remote branch with your local branch
- It basically tells the remote, ignore your history, use mine
When Might You Need It?
- Sometimes, after rewriting commit history with commands like git rebase or git commit --amend, you may need to use git push --force to update the remote repository with your new history
- This is common in more complex workflows where you need to clean up or reorganize commits before pushing them.
Why It Can Be Bad
- Loss of History: Any commits present on the remote that are not present on your local branch when you force push will be lost
- Collaboration Issues: Your teammates might not be aware that you just removed a bunch of commits, so when they attempt to push their changes git is going to tell them there’s a conflict
- Best Practices: Use force-push only when absolutely necessary and when you are sure it won’t negatively affect others. Consider using git push --force-with-lease as a safer alternative, which only force-pushes if no new commits have been added to the remote branch since your last fetch.

Files that are not staged will not be included in commits
To ensure all your files are committed, check the status with git status and stage any new files with git add.

When merging branches, conflicts may arise if changes in the branches overlap.
Git will indicate the conflicting files, but resolving conflicts requires manual editing, and then manually telling git the conflicts have been resolved

Once a commit is made, it is part of the history, and while it can be reverted or amended, it cannot be completely undone.
You can “revert” a commit, which means to make a new commit that undoes all the changes made in a specific previous commit
To revert a commit, use:
```
git revert <commit-hash>
```
To modify the last commit (e.g., to fix a typo in the commit message), use:
```
git commit --amend
```