git-mastery

Adding files to a repository

Now that you have a local repository setup, how do you start adding files to it.

Mental model: Repositories as folders

We will develop the mental model for understanding Git throughout the tours, but for now, let’s start imagining the local repository as a regular project folder with files and sub-directories.

There are no magical commands that you run to add/edit/delete files in a local repository, everything is done as regular actions against a folder.

So, open the project folder created from last lesson’s hands-on in your favorite editor and let’s get started!

For the remainder of this tour, we will be using Vim as the core editor, along with various Bash commands (make sure it’s properly installed) as it is the easiest to explain.

However, you are free to use Visual Studio Code or any other IDE that you prefer!

Adding files

To add new files to a local repository, simply create the file in the project folder.

If you are using Bash, you might use something like touch <filename> or if you’re using an IDE, you can also interactively create it.

🧤 Hands-on: Adding files to local folder

We will discuss how to manage these changes in subsequent lessons.

1

Create a new file

We will create a new file using touch to make things simple:

touch hello_world.txt

2

Editing the file contents

Then, edit the file contents fo the file using your favorite editor:

vim hello_world.txt

Or if you want a quick and easy way to append text to a file, use:

echo "Hello world!" >> hello_world.txt

3

Repeat this a few more times

Repeat steps (1) and (2) a few more times with different file names and different file contents!

In fact, try creating multiple sub-directories and nest files in them!

Be as creative as possible!

4

View the files in your project

Now that you have created a bunch of files, you can view them in Bash via:

ls

Alternatively, in your IDE, you should have a file explorer to display this information!

Now what?

Now that you have created a bunch of files in your local repository, how do you go about bridging this gap between a regular project folder and using the features of Git?

This is what we will cover in the next lesson!

Previous ← Initializing local repositories Next Viewing repository status →

Table of Contents

Mental model: Repositories as folders Adding files Now what?