8 August 2026

Three Git Commands I Run Before Publishing

A simple pre-push check for seeing changed, unstaged and staged content before it reaches a public repository.

A public technical repository needs a slightly different mindset from an internal one.

Before committing, these three commands are useful:

git status
git diff
git diff --cached

git status

Shows which files are:

• modified
• new/untracked
• staged
• deleted

git diff

Shows changes that have not yet been staged.

git diff --cached

Shows what is currently staged and therefore what the next commit will contain.

That last check is particularly useful before publishing PowerShell or configuration examples.

I am looking for things such as:

• API tokens
• tenant or account IDs
• internal hostnames
• private URLs
• email addresses
• private IP addressing
• credentials
• accidental debug output
• files that were never intended to be public

Git makes publishing easy.

That is exactly why checking the commit before pushing matters.