From the course: Git: Branches, Merges, and Remotes

Create and switch branches

From the course: Git: Branches, Merges, and Remotes

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Create and switch branches

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- [Instructor] In the previous two movies, we learned how to create branches, and we learned how to switch branches. We don't have to do them as two separate steps though, we can actually do them all together. And that's what I want us to see how to do in this movie. The first thing you want to do, is figure out which branch you're on currently. Because if we're going to make another branch, it matters which branch we're on, where the head is pointing to, because it will branch from that point. So if I'm on the master branch, git log dash dash oneline, it's going to branch from this command. If I'm on the new_feature branch, then it's going to branch from the tip of that which that additional commit we made and we made a change to the title of the index.html page. That's what's in that additional command. So let's say that this new branch that I want to create, I want to make use of what's in new_feature. So I really want to branch off of there. So the first thing I need to do is make sure that I check out the new_feature branch. Now when I type git branch, it tells me that I'm on the new_feature branch and when I create a new branch from here, it will include that additional command right here. D4f3, and so on. Now, we already know how to create a branch off of Master and creating a branch from here is the exact same way. Git and then branch and then the name of the branch we want to create. So let's call it shorten_title. Now if I did this just like this and hit Return, it would create a branch. But it would not switch us to it. That's what we saw before. So in order to switch us to it, we're going to change it and instead of branch, we're going to use checkout but with a dash b option. So it's going to checkout a new branch called shorten_title. It'll do it all in one step. It creates the branch and checks it out. So I'll hit Return, switch to a new branch called shorten_title, so we know it created it. It didn't exist before, now it does. Git branch will show us that it now exists and we switch to it at the same time. So what we're essentially saying here is check it out as a new branch called shorten_title. So let's make a change to the shorten_title page. I'm going to go back to the Atom text editor. You can see that that code is there, Affordable Tours. Let's take out this part here, Welcome to. Let's just make it Explore California dash Affordable Outdoor Tours. So I'm going to save that, now we have an uncommitted change. We can see that with git status, here it is. We can use git add to add it and notice here that it says after we use git add, use git check out with a dash dash with the file name if we want it to discard those changes. Checkout has another meaning here. It's not just for checking out branches. This is saying checkout from the current branch, a file, checkout, the branch. Just notice that. Checkout is used in both contexts. What we're really saying to git is go get these set of changes and bring them into my working directory. So let's commit these with git commit dash m, shorten the title of index.html. Now it's committed. Get log dash dash oneline. And we can now see that there are three branches. Master points to this commit. New_feature points to this one and shorten_title and HEAD both point to this one. Most developers use checkout with the dash b option to both create and switch at the same time because most of the time, as soon as you create it, you're going to want to start working with it so it makes sense to just do it in one step.

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