Every Monday, the brain fog is real. Memorizing exact CLI syntax is secondary to actually building things. Every developer has a mental “cheat sheet” of commands they use just infrequently enough to forget, but often enough to find it annoying to search for every time.
I made this post as my personal copy-paste arsenal. If you stumbled upon this from a search engine, I hope it saves your Monday morning, too!
1. The Weekly Routine: Syncing a Fork with Upstream
Note: This assumes you have already set the upstream remote using git remote add upstream <original-repo-url>.
Here is the exact copy-paste workflow to fetch the latest changes, apply them to your local main branch, and push them to your GitHub fork:
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| # 1. Fetch all branches and commits from the upstream repo
git fetch upstream
# 2. Switch to your local main branch (or master)
git checkout main
# 3. Merge the upstream changes into your local branch
git merge upstream/main
# 4. Push the updated local branch to your remote fork (origin)
git push origin main
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2. The Git “Oops” Moments
These are the commands to scramble for when you make a slight mistake but don’t want to nuke your entire repository to fix it.
Undo the last commit (keep the code changes)
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| git reset --soft HEAD~1
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Completely wipe out the last commit and its changes (Danger!)
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| git reset --hard HEAD~1
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Fix a typo in your last commit message
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| git commit --amend -m "Your new, typo-free message"
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Delete a branch both locally and remotely
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| git branch -d branch_name # Local
git push origin --delete branch_name # Remote
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Discard all local, uncommitted changes
When you just want to revert a file back to how it was at the last commit:
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| # Discard changes in a specific file
git restore path/to/file
# Discard ALL uncommitted changes in the repo
git restore .
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3. Git Stashing & History
When you are in the middle of something but need to switch branches quickly.
Stash your current changes
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| # Stash with a descriptive message so you don't forget what it is
git stash push -m "WIP: login feature"
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Apply your stashed changes back
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| # Apply the most recent stash and remove it from the stash list
git stash pop
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View a clean, readable Git history tree
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| git log --graph --oneline --decorate --all
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4. Terminal & Port Lifesavers
Nothing is more annoying than trying to spin up a local server and getting a “Port already in use” error.
Find what is running on a specific port and kill it
For example, to free up port 3000:
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| # Find the Process ID (PID)
lsof -i :3000
# Kill the process (replace <PID> with the number from the command above)
kill -9 <PID>
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Search for a specific string inside all files in a directory
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| grep -rnw '/path/to/search/' -e 'search_string'
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| tar -xzvf file.tar.gz
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5. File System Wizardry
Create a deeply nested directory structure all at once
Stop typing mkdir three times in a row. Use the -p flag.
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| mkdir -p folder/subfolder/another_folder
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Create a symbolic link (Symlink)
The syntax is always ln -s [TARGET] [LINK_NAME]. Think of it as creating a shortcut.
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| ln -s /path/to/original/file /path/to/link
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Find files taking up the most space in a directory
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| du -sh * | sort -rh | head -10
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6. Node.js & NPM Sanity Checks
Sometimes the only way to fix a JavaScript project is to nuke it from orbit and start over.
The “Turn it off and on again” for NPM
Delete node_modules and package-lock.json, clear the cache, and reinstall.
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| rm -rf node_modules package-lock.json
npm cache clean --force
npm install
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7. Docker Housekeeping
Docker loves to eat up hard drive space with unused containers and dangling images. Here is how to clean it up.
Stop all running containers
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| docker stop $(docker ps -a -q)
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Nuke all unused containers, networks, images, and volumes
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| docker system prune -a --volumes
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8. SSH Keys
Setting up a new dev machine? Here is the exact command to generate a fresh SSH key for GitHub/GitLab.
Generate a new SSH Key
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| ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "your_email@example.com"
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(Press Enter to accept the default file location and add a secure passphrase if desired).
Copy your public key to the clipboard (macOS)
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| pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub
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(For Linux, use xclip -sel clip < ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub or cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub and copy it manually).
