Git interview questions

All interview topics

Git interview questions with diagrams of what each command does to your history: commits and branches, merge vs rebase, undoing mistakes, recovering lost work, team workflows and pull requests.

28 questions
12 easy
15 medium
1 hard
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28 of 28 questions

Git interview questions

1What is Git, and how is it different from GitHub?EasyBasics

2Explain Git's working directory, staging area and repository.EasyBasics

3What is a commit, and how does Git store it?MediumBasicsInternals

4What is a branch in Git?EasyBranching

5What is the difference between git merge and git rebase?MediumBranchingHistory

6What is a fast-forward merge?MediumBranching

7What causes a merge conflict, and how do you resolve it?EasyBranchingCollaboration

8What is the difference between git fetch and git pull?EasyCollaboration

9What are remotes, origin and upstream branches?EasyCollaboration

10What is the difference between git reset and git revert?MediumUndoing changes

11How do you fix the last commit's message or add a forgotten file?EasyUndoing changes

12How do you recover a commit you lost, for example after a bad reset?MediumUndoing changesInternals

13How do you discard local changes to a file?EasyUndoing changes

14What is git stash, and when would you use it?EasyWorkflow

15What can you do with an interactive rebase?MediumHistory

16What does git cherry-pick do?MediumHistory

17Should you squash commits when merging a pull request?MediumHistoryCollaboration

18How do you find which commit introduced a bug?MediumDebugging

19What branching strategies do you know? Which would you choose?MediumWorkflowCollaboration

20What makes a good pull request and code review?MediumCollaboration

21What is .gitignore, and how do you stop tracking a file that's already committed?EasyBasics

22When is git push --force acceptable, and what is --force-with-lease?MediumCollaborationHistory

23What are Git tags, and how are they used for releases?EasyWorkflow

24How do you handle code shared between repositories: submodules, subtrees or a monorepo?HardWorkflow

25What are Git hooks?MediumWorkflowTools

26What makes a good commit message?EasyWorkflow

27What do HEAD, HEAD~1 and HEAD^ mean?MediumInternals

28How does Git handle large files, and what is Git LFS?MediumWorkflowTools