Creating a Repository

Overview

Teaching: 15 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• Where does Git store information?

Objectives

• Create a local Git repository.

• Describe the purpose of the .git directory.

Once Git is configured, we can start using it.

First, let’s a new directory in the home directory folder for our work (mkdir command), and then change the current working directory to the newly created one (cd command):

$ 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

If we ever delete the .git subdirectory, we will lose the project’s history. It’s best to simply leave that directory alone.

In the setup episode, we set the default branch name to be main for more information on this change. We can check that everything is set up correctly by asking Git to tell us the status of our project:

$ git status

On branch main

No commits yet

nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

If you are using a different version of git, the exact wording of the output might be slightly different.

Key Points

• git init initializes a repository.

• Git stores all of its repository data in the .git directory.