25. Navigating Branches

Goals

To learn how to navigate between the repository branches

Now your project has two branches:

Run:

git hist --all

Result:

$ git hist --all
* 07a2a46 2011-03-09 | Updated index.html (HEAD, style) [Alexander Shvets]
* 649d26c 2011-03-09 | Hello uses style.css [Alexander Shvets]
* 1f3cbd2 2011-03-09 | Added css stylesheet [Alexander Shvets]
* 8029c07 2011-03-09 | Added index.html. (master) [Alexander Shvets]
* 567948a 2011-03-09 | Moved hello.html to lib [Alexander Shvets]
* 6a78635 2011-03-09 | Add an author/email comment [Alexander Shvets]
* fa3c141 2011-03-09 | Added HTML header (v1) [Alexander Shvets]
* 8c32287 2011-03-09 | Added standard HTML page tags (v1-beta) [Alexander Shvets]
* 43628f7 2011-03-09 | Added h1 tag [Alexander Shvets]
* 911e8c9 2011-03-09 | First Commit [Alexander Shvets]

01 Switching to the Master branch

To switch between branches simply use the git checkout command.

Run:

git checkout master
cat lib/hello.html

Result:

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
$ cat lib/hello.html
<!-- Author: Alexander Shvets (alex@githowto.com) -->
<html>
  <head>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

Now we are on the Master branch. It can be proven by the fact the hello.html file does not use styles from style.css.

02 Let us return to the style branch.

Run:

git checkout style
cat lib/hello.html

Result:

$ git checkout style
Switched to branch 'style'
$ cat lib/hello.html
<!-- Author: Alexander Shvets (alex@githowto.com) -->
<html>
  <head>
    <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" media="all" href="style.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, World!</h1>
  </body>
</html>

We are back to the style branch which can be proven by the fact the hello.html file uses styles from style.css.