Overview
Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
Where does Git store information?
Objectives
Create a local Git repository.
Once Git is configured, we can start using it. Let’s create a directory for our work and then move into that directory:
$ mkdir planets
$ cd planets
Then we tell Git to make planets
a repository—a place where
Git can store versions of our files:
$ git init
If we use ls
to show the directory’s contents,
it appears that nothing has changed:
$ ls
But if we add the -a
flag to show everything,
we can see that Git has created a hidden directory within planets
called .git
:
$ ls -a
. .. .git
Git stores information about the project in this special sub-directory. If we ever delete it, we will lose the project’s history.
We can check that everything is set up correctly by asking Git to tell us the status of our project:
$ git status
# On branch master
#
# Initial commit
#
nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)
Places to Create Git Repositories
Dracula starts a new project,
moons
, related to hisplanets
project. Despite Wolfman’s concerns, he enters the following sequence of commands to create one Git repository inside another:cd # return to home directory mkdir planets # make a new directory planets cd planets # go into planets git init # make the planets directory a Git repository mkdir moons # make a sub-directory planets/moons cd moons # go into planets/moons git init # make the moons sub-directory a Git repository
Why is it a bad idea to do this? How can Dracula undo his last
git init
?
Key Points
git init
initializes a repository.