Learning Git

Chapter 2. Local Repositories

[ 2 ]

Local Repositories

In the last chapter, you learned some command line basics and you prepared to work with Git by downloading it and configuring some settings. In this chapter, you will turn the rainbow project directory you created in Chapter 1 into a Git repository. You will also learn about four important areas when working with Git: the working directory, the staging area, the commit history, and the local repository. To help you visualize how each of these areas works together, we will build a Git Diagram that will include a representation of each area. Finally, at the end of this chapter you will add the first file to the rainbow project directory, and in the process learn about untracked and tracked files. Let’s get started!

Current Setup

At the start of this chapter you should have:

• Downloaded or updated Git on your computer. (You will need a version equal to or greater than 2.28.)
• Created an empty project directory called rainbow on your desktop.
• Opened a command line window and navigated into the rainbow directory.
• Decided on a text editor to use and opened the rainbow project directory in a text editor window.
• Set the user.name and user.email global Git configuration variables to your name and email address.

Introducing Repositories

A repository (also known as a repo) is how we refer to a project version controlled by Git. In reality, there are two types of repositories:

• A local repository is a repository that is stored ...