Creating a Repository

Overview

Teaching: 10 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. The usage we will demonstrate is making a respository for a personal website. Later, we’ll show how you can publish this site on GitHub pages.

First, let’s create a directory in Desktop folder for our work and then move into that directory:

$ cd ~/Desktop
$ mkdir simple-site
$ cd simple-site

Then we tell Git to make simple-site a repository – a place where Git can store versions of our files:

$ git init

It is important to note that git init will create a repository that includes subdirectories and their files—there is no need to create separate repositories nested within the simple-site repository, whether subdirectories are present from the beginning or added later. Also, note that the creation of the simple-site directory and its initialization as a repository are completely separate processes.

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 simple-site called .git:

$ ls -a

.	..	.git

Git uses this special subdirectory to store all the information about the project, including all files and sub-directories located within the project’s directory. If we ever delete the .git subdirectory, we will lose the project’s history.

Next, we will change the default branch to be called main. This might be the default branch depending on your settings and version of git. See the setup episode for more information on this change.

# only necessary if default branch is 'master'
git checkout -b main

Switched to a new branch 'main'

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.