Ask HN: How often do you commit / push in Git?

Approximately once or twice per hour.

To my private branch? As often as I feel I need to feel safe about backing up the changes I made.

How often do you press "Save Game" during a new level?

I use feature branched for everything, usually named after an issue number. I created a script that allows me to commit whenever I get a task done, not the whole feature, and that script takes care of adding the files, committing them with a message, tags it with the issue number (current branch name), and pushes to remote. That way, every time I save, the changes are saved on the remote GIT repo in case my computer dies or something.

Here's the code in case you wanted to use it:

savework()

{

  if git diff --exit-code --quiet

  then

    echo "There are no changes to save, NONE!";

  else

    echo "Stage everything for commit -------------";

    addit; # an alias for "git add -A ."

    echo "Commit all changes with message $@ --------------";

    commit "$@"; #commit is an alias for "git commit -m"

    echo "Push branch to remote --------------"
    psh; # an alias for git push origin $(git branch | grep "*" | sed "s/* //")

  fi

}

Use it like this: savework "COMMIT MESSAGE HERE"

Depends. If it's just the beginning of a project or a side project where I'm definitely the only person working on it then I generally just use it as a backup system. If it's a more substantial project then I try to remember to commit and branch off before embarking on new feature additions, major refactors, or really anything where several hours in you could find yourself cursing and deciding that particular adventure was ill advised or is currently not worth it.

I'm not sure there's a generalizable pattern there for which has a lower actual time interval between commit/pushes but I suspect that I tend to be spammier with them in personal projects.

I commit every time I complete an atomic unit of work. Write a 3-line test and a 3-line method that passes it? Commit.

Working on something that will take a week to be atomically complete and testable? (For instance, a major refactoring.) I'll write myself a checklist of steps and commit every time I complete a step.

As someone else said, once every 30 sec is too often, and once a day is too infrequent if you're coding 8 hours a day. When I'm in a rhythm I'll typically go anywhere from 10 min to 2 hours between non-trivial (e.g. typo-fix) commits.

I do not push every commit immediately. Once a day is a good minimum as a backup strategy and if you want to make sure you can work on the codebase from elsewhere or if you have a CI system to warn you of merge conflicts.

I'll also push whenever I complete a ticket (for long-running branches we typically have sub-tickets, or I'll push when I've completed work that someone I'm sharing the branch with can build on.) Git makes it easy to develop those units of work on separate branches, and when you merge them back to the feature branch is generally a good time to push.