Question

Hey,
I’m now using Xcode 4 for a few weeks. It’s just great to come from Xcode 3 and see all the new features. I like the git integration. But I have the one and other problem with that.
The newest project I started with a local git repository. That all works fine and I did multiple commits. I want to get an older version of my project. So I try to use Pull. But as soon as I click that button, I get the following message:

The operation could not be performed because access to the repository "/Users/***/Desktop/TestClone" was denied.

Check your name and password and try again.

The problem is, I didn’t define anywhere a name and a password. How can I get a copy of a state in my project?
The checkout button is always grayed out so I can’t click that one.

Any help would be appreciated. 😀

Answer 1

You should not use the ‘pull…’ command for “going back to” (checking out) an older version of your code.

The ‘pull’ and ‘push’ commands are used for synchronizing your local repository with an “origin” remote repository. This feature is normally used when you ‘clone’ an original remote repository in order to coordinate your changes with other programmers.

If you created your project from scratch, you won’t have any remote repository to push to or pull from.

Back to the original question, as far as I know, Xcode 4 won’t let you to checkout older commits within the user interface, unless you created a new branch for that commit. Nevertheless, you can do it from the command line. For that, use the following command from your project folder

$ git log --format=oneline

to get the hash code of the commit you want to go to, and then use:

$ git checkout desired-hash-code

to checkout that particular version. Once there, you can make tests, changes, and possibly create a new branch. If you do a commit without creating a new branch, you will lose the newer commits in your current branch. If you want to go back to the newest commit after having performed some tests on your older version use:

$ git checkout master

note again that this won’t work if you do a new commit from your old code version without creating a new branch, because newer commits in the current branch get dereferenced.

If you are new to Git, I would read any of these documents:

• http://sixrevisions.com/resources/git-tutorials-beginners/

I would also like to highlight these two:

• The Git Parable – http://tom.preston-werner.com/2009/05/19/the-git-parable.html
• A Visual Git Reference – http://marklodato.github.com/visual-git-guide/index-en.html

Cheers.