At this point, you should have a bona fide Git repository on your local machine, and a checkout or working copy of all of its files in front of you. Typically, you’ll want to start making changes and committing snapshots of those changes into your repository each time the project reaches a state you want to record.

Remember that each file in your working directory can be in one of two states: tracked or untracked. Tracked files are files that were in the last snapshot; they can be unmodified, modified, or staged. In short, tracked files are files that Git knows about.

Untracked files are everything else — any files in your working directory that were not in your last snapshot and are not in your staging area. When you first clone a repository, all of your files will be tracked and unmodified because Git just checked them out and you haven’t edited anything.

As you edit files, Git sees them as modified, because you’ve changed them since your last commit. As you work, you selectively stage these modified files and then commit all those staged changes, and the cycle repeats.

You can see that your new README file is untracked, because it’s under the “Untracked files” heading in your status output. Untracked basically means that Git sees a file you didn’t have in the previous snapshot (commit); Git won’t start including it in your commit snapshots until you explicitly tell it to do so. It does this so you don’t accidentally begin including generated binary files or other files that you did not mean to include. You do want to start including README , so let’s start tracking the file.

Let’s say you add a new file to your project, a simple README file. If the file didn’t exist before, and you run git status , you see your untracked file like so:

This means you have a clean working directory; in other words, none of your tracked files are modified. Git also doesn’t see any untracked files, or they would be listed here. Finally, the command tells you which branch you’re on and informs you that it has not diverged from the same branch on the server. For now, that branch is always master , which is the default; you won’t worry about it here. Git Branching will go over branches and references in detail.

The main tool you use to determine which files are in which state is the git status command. If you run this command directly after a clone, you should see something like this:

You can tell that it’s staged because it’s under the “Changes to be committed” heading. If you commit at this point, the version of the file at the time you ran git add is what will be in the subsequent historical snapshot. You may recall that when you ran git init earlier, you then ran git add <files> — that was to begin tracking files in your directory. The git add command takes a path name for either a file or a directory; if it’s a directory, the command adds all the files in that directory recursively.

If you run your status command again, you can see that your README file is now tracked and staged to be committed:

In order to begin tracking a new file, you use the command git add . To begin tracking the README file, you can run this:

What the heck? Now CONTRIBUTING.md is listed as both staged and unstaged. How is that possible? It turns out that Git stages a file exactly as it is when you run the git add command. If you commit now, the version of CONTRIBUTING.md as it was when you last ran the git add command is how it will go into the commit, not the version of the file as it looks in your working directory when you run git commit . If you modify a file after you run git add , you have to run git add again to stage the latest version of the file:

Both files are staged and will go into your next commit. At this point, suppose you remember one little change that you want to make in CONTRIBUTING.md before you commit it. You open it again and make that change, and you’re ready to commit. However, let’s run git status one more time:

The CONTRIBUTING.md file appears under a section named “Changes not staged for commit” — which means that a file that is tracked has been modified in the working directory but not yet staged. To stage it, you run the git add command. git add is a multipurpose command — you use it to begin tracking new files, to stage files, and to do other things like marking merge-conflicted files as resolved. It may be helpful to think of it more as “add precisely this content to the next commit” rather than “add this file to the project”. Let’s run git add now to stage the CONTRIBUTING.md file, and then run git status again:

Let’s change a file that was already tracked. If you change a previously tracked file called CONTRIBUTING.md and then run your git status command again, you get something that looks like this:

New files that aren’t tracked have a ?? next to them, new files that have been added to the staging area have an A , modified files have an M and so on. There are two columns to the output — the left-hand column indicates the status of the staging area and the right-hand column indicates the status of the working tree. So for example in that output, the README file is modified in the working directory but not yet staged, while the lib/simplegit.rb file is modified and staged. The Rakefile was modified, staged and then modified again, so there are changes to it that are both staged and unstaged.

While the git status output is pretty comprehensive, it’s also quite wordy. Git also has a short status flag so you can see your changes in a more compact way. If you run git status -s or git status --short you get a far more simplified output from the command:

It is beyond the scope of this book to get into the details of multiple .gitignore files; see man gitignore for the details.

In the simple case, a repository might have a single .gitignore file in its root directory, which applies recursively to the entire repository. However, it is also possible to have additional .gitignore files in subdirectories. The rules in these nested .gitignore files apply only to the files under the directory where they are located. The Linux kernel source repository has 206 .gitignore files.

GitHub maintains a fairly comprehensive list of good .gitignore file examples for dozens of projects and languages at https://github.com/github/gitignore if you want a starting point for your project.

Glob patterns are like simplified regular expressions that shells use. An asterisk ( * ) matches zero or more characters; [abc] matches any character inside the brackets (in this case a, b, or c); a question mark ( ? ) matches a single character; and brackets enclosing characters separated by a hyphen ( [0-9] ) matches any character between them (in this case 0 through 9). You can also use two asterisks to match nested directories; a/**/z would match a/z , a/b/z , a/b/c/z , and so on.

The rules for the patterns you can put in the .gitignore file are as follows:

The first line tells Git to ignore any files ending in “.o” or “.a” — object and archive files that may be the product of building your code. The second line tells Git to ignore all files whose names end with a tilde ( ~ ), which is used by many text editors such as Emacs to mark temporary files. You may also include a log, tmp, or pid directory; automatically generated documentation; and so on. Setting up a .gitignore file for your new repository before you get going is generally a good idea so you don’t accidentally commit files that you really don’t want in your Git repository.

Often, you’ll have a class of files that you don’t want Git to automatically add or even show you as being untracked. These are generally automatically generated files such as log files or files produced by your build system. In such cases, you can create a file listing patterns to match them named .gitignore . Here is an example .gitignore file:

Viewing Your Staged and Unstaged Changes

If the git status command is too vague for you — you want to know exactly what you changed, not just which files were changed — you can use the git diff command. We’ll cover git diff in more detail later, but you’ll probably use it most often to answer these two questions: What have you changed but not yet staged? And what have you staged that you are about to commit? Although git status answers those questions very generally by listing the file names, git diff shows you the exact lines added and removed — the patch, as it were.

Let’s say you edit and stage the README file again and then edit the CONTRIBUTING.md file without staging it. If you run your git status command, you once again see something like this:

$ git status On branch master Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'. Changes to be committed: (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage) modified: README Changes not staged for commit: (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory) modified: CONTRIBUTING.md

To see what you’ve changed but not yet staged, type git diff with no other arguments:

$ git diff diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 8ebb991..643e24f 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -65,7 +65,8 @@ branch directly, things can get messy. Please include a nice description of your changes when you submit your PR; if we have to read the whole diff to figure out why you're contributing in the first place, you're less likely to get feedback and have your change -merged in. +merged in. Also, split your changes into comprehensive chunks if your patch is +longer than a dozen lines. If you are starting to work on a particular area, feel free to submit a PR that highlights your work in progress (and note in the PR title that it's

That command compares what is in your working directory with what is in your staging area. The result tells you the changes you’ve made that you haven’t yet staged.

If you want to see what you’ve staged that will go into your next commit, you can use git diff --staged . This command compares your staged changes to your last commit:

$ git diff --staged diff --git a/README b/README new file mode 100644 index 0000000..03902a1 --- /dev/null +++ b/README @@ -0,0 +1 @@ +My Project

It’s important to note that git diff by itself doesn’t show all changes made since your last commit — only changes that are still unstaged. If you’ve staged all of your changes, git diff will give you no output.

For another example, if you stage the CONTRIBUTING.md file and then edit it, you can use git diff to see the changes in the file that are staged and the changes that are unstaged. If our environment looks like this:

$ git add CONTRIBUTING.md $ echo '# test line' >> CONTRIBUTING.md $ git status On branch master Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'. Changes to be committed: (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage) modified: CONTRIBUTING.md Changes not staged for commit: (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed) (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory) modified: CONTRIBUTING.md

Now you can use git diff to see what is still unstaged:

$ git diff diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 643e24f..87f08c8 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -119,3 +119,4 @@ at the ## Starter Projects See our [projects list](https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/development/PROJECTS.md). +# test line

and git diff --cached to see what you’ve staged so far ( --staged and --cached are synonyms):

$ git diff --cached diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md index 8ebb991..643e24f 100644 --- a/CONTRIBUTING.md +++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md @@ -65,7 +65,8 @@ branch directly, things can get messy. Please include a nice description of your changes when you submit your PR; if we have to read the whole diff to figure out why you're contributing in the first place, you're less likely to get feedback and have your change -merged in. +merged in. Also, split your changes into comprehensive chunks if your patch is +longer than a dozen lines. If you are starting to work on a particular area, feel free to submit a PR that highlights your work in progress (and note in the PR title that it's