Git Hands-On Labs

First day on the OpsTrack team: before anyone commits, Git has to know who they are and how this team starts a repository.

Beginner · 15 min

Put OpsTrack under version control and stage its first file — without committing anything yet.

Beginner · 15 min

Record OpsTrack's first reviewable history: the README first, then the service — and keep a local secret out of it.

Beginner · 20 min

Two unrelated edits, one file each: see exactly what is in the working tree, the index and the last commit, and commit them separately.

Beginner · 20 min

A local test run left artefacts behind and someone staged the production env file. Get the secret out and make the repository keep it out.

Beginner · 25 min

An endpoint and a log fix, tangled in one file overnight. Stage hunk by hunk and give reviewers two commits.

Beginner · 25 min

Answer four questions about OpsTrack's history with evidence from Git, for the team's onboarding page.

Beginner · 20 min

Kubernetes needs a readiness probe before the staging rollout. Build it on a branch so main stays releasable while you work.

Beginner · 25 min

OPS-110 is approved. Review exactly what the branch changes, merge it into main, and clean up.

Beginner · 20 min

Half-way through metrics work, production needs a config fix now. Park your work, fix main, and pick up exactly where you left off.

Beginner · 25 min

You and Alice changed the same line. Merge her branch, resolve the conflict to the value the team agreed, and keep the rest of her work.

Beginner · 25 min

Carol retired a script on main; Bob's branch still edits it. Merge Bob's work, keep the script deleted, and carry his change to where it belongs now.

Beginner · 25 min

Two approved branches, one team policy: fast-forward when you can, an explicit merge commit for CI changes. Predict from the graph, then integrate both.

Beginner · 25 min

The platform team created an empty shared repository. Connect OpsTrack to it, publish main with tracking, and keep your private experiment private.

Intermediate · 20 min

Your workstation was reimaged and Carol has cut a release branch. Clone the team repository and set up a local release branch that tracks it.

Intermediate · 20 min

Alice is pushing Terraform for a new region. See her work arrive, inspect it before it touches your branch, then integrate with a fast-forward only.

Intermediate · 20 min

You committed a replica change; Bob pushed an Ansible change first. Read the rejected push, integrate both histories, and publish without force.

Intermediate · 25 min

Production alert rules go through review. Publish a branch, generate a pull request with Git itself, and answer review feedback with a follow-up commit.

Intermediate · 25 min

Your private log-rotation branch is based on last week's main, and Alice changed the same Ansible play. Replay your commits on top of the team's main and publish a linear branch.

Intermediate · 30 min

release/1.0 needs Bob's Cache-Control fix — and nothing else from his branch. Copy exactly that commit, record where it came from, and publish the release branch.

Intermediate · 25 min

A messy morning: debug junk in a doc, a local tweak staged by mistake, and a deleted script. Fix each one in the layer where it lives, without a commit.

Intermediate · 20 min

Three disposable clones, three practice commits each. Squash with --soft, uncommit with --mixed, discard with --hard — and see that the reflog still remembers.

Intermediate · 30 min

Yesterday's pushed change to 32 workers ran staging out of memory, and Alice has pushed on top of it. Undo it publicly with a revert — never by rewriting main.

Intermediate · 25 min

A hasty clean-up deleted an unpushed branch with two days of work. Find its commits in the reflog, recreate the branch, and publish it before anything else goes wrong.

Intermediate · 20 min

Five noisy commits — wip, fix typo, oops — on a private branch. Rewrite them into one feature commit and one docs commit that a reviewer can read, without losing a byte.

Intermediate · 30 min

Carol approved 1.0.0. Record the changelog, then mark exactly that commit with an annotated release tag — the object your deployment pipeline will trust.

Intermediate · 20 min

The pipeline deploys tags. Publish the release commit and the v1.0.0 tag — and only that tag — then see why a published release tag must never move.

Intermediate · 15 min

Bob committed from a Windows laptop and the smoke test now dies with bash\r. Make the repository — not each laptop — decide line endings, then normalize history from here on.

Intermediate · 25 min

After the near miss with a secret, the team wants a shared hook that blocks secret-like values and whitespace errors before they are ever committed.

Intermediate · 25 min

Mid-way through Helm edits, Bob's commit breaks the staging probe. Fix it in a second working tree on the team's latest main — without stashing or disturbing your Helm work.

Intermediate · 25 min

The SRE runbooks live in their own repository. Include them in OpsTrack pinned to the reviewed v2.3.0, not whatever is newest, and publish the pin.

Intermediate · 30 min

Prepare a post-mortem: when did the connection cap appear, when did a flag die, how often did the log format change, and what did the 1.0.0 release actually contain?

Advanced · 25 min

Why is HEALTH_TIMEOUT 2? A move and a whole-file re-indent hide who decided it. See through both, find the reason, and make blame skip the re-indent for the whole team.

Advanced · 25 min

The config check passed at v1.0.0 and fails on main, with dozens of commits between and one that cannot even run. Let git bisect find the first bad commit, keep the evidence, and clean up.

Advanced · 30 min

The rate-limit feature must land on release/1.1 and on main, and both conflict the same way. Resolve it once, let Git reuse your resolution, and publish both branches.

Advanced · 25 min

INC-101: since the 1.1.0 rollout, /health answers 404 and the load balancer is draining pods. Protect your own work, find the commit that broke production, ship a minimal, auditable v1.1.1, and get back to what you were doing.

Advanced · 90 min