Version Control with Git

Creating a Repository

Once Git is configured, we can start using it. For this lesson, we will create a personal blog and host it on GitHub. Let’s create a directory for our blog and then move into that directory:

$ cd
$ mkdir my-blog
$ cd my-blog

Then we tell Git to make my-blog 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 my-blog 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)

cd                 # return to home directory
mkdir project-1    # make a new directory project-1
cd project-1       # go into project-1
git init           # make the project-1 directory a Git repository
mkdir project-2    # make a sub-directory project-1/project-2
cd project-2       # go into project-1/project-2
git init           # make the project-2 sub-directory a Git repository