git-mastery

Initializing local repositories

Overview

For this tour, we will focus on developing your understanding of how Git repositories work locally, looking at how you can add files to a local repository and starting to manage a linear history of commits.

Why local repositories?

Let’s suppose that you have a project that you’re working on locally and you want to track the history of the changes using Git. You can turn the project folder into a local repository.

You can find out more about the differences between local and remote repositories in the previous tour: Local vs remote repositories.

Creating a local repository

There are two scenarios where you might create a local repository:

  1. You have an existing project folder
  2. You have a blank project folder

In both scenarios, you will use the same command to initialize the local repository: git init.

git init

To initialize a project folder as a local Git repository, navigate to that folder in your terminal using cd.

Then, run the following command:

git init

This creates a hidden folder .git/ in the root of your project folder, which contains the information Git uses for version control.

If you are interested to learn more about what goes into .git/, refer to the documentation!

🧤 Hands-on: Create a local repository

Hands-on activities are short follow along demonstrations for each tour. Run the appropriate commands and play around with different variations!

1

Create a new folder

Create a new local folder to contain all of the hands-on practices:

mkdir git-mastery-hands-on

2

Change directory

Navigate into the hands-on folder:

cd git-mastery-hands-on

3

Initialize the folder as a local repository

Initialize the empty folder as a local repository:

git init

4

Verification

Verify that the project folder has the .git/ folder:

[ -d .git ] && echo 'Project is a local Git repository!' || echo 'Project is not a local Git repository...'

You should see the message:

Project is a local Git repository!

You can also run the following command to view all hidden folders in your current directory, and if you see .git/, you will know that the local repository was initialized:

ls -al
Previous ← Back to tours Next Adding files to a repository →

Table of Contents

Overview Why local repositories? Creating a local repository git init