04-git-started.md

Git Started

We are now ready to get started, and create a repository and work with it.

Initialising a Repository for a 'project'

There are three main ways to start a project.

Two of them presume you have no existing files to begin with, and the third when you have files in an existing folder.

• Create a folder (for the project) and initialise
• Initialise with folder (project) name
• Initialise with the existing folder and files

Option 1: Create a folder then initialising

Use mkdir command to create the folder, change into the new folder, and then using the git init . command.

Let's presume the new project will be in the Duck-Rogers folder.

Use the pwd command to verify the folder:

You see that the Windows \ have been reversed to / and the : removed.

mkdir Duck-Rogers
cd Duck-Rogers
git init .

The command prompt will now show either (master) or (main) - if it is master, we will show you later how to (a) change it to main for the current project and (b) to make main the default.

Option 2: Initialise project and folder at same time

To create the Duck-Rogers folder and initialise in a single move, we do the following:

git init Duck-Rogers
cd Duck-Rogers

Option 3: Initialise project with existing files

The best part of this is that you are basically able to use the previous options, except the folder already exists.

For example, if Duck-Rogers already exist and has files, then, if we are at the parent folder for Duck-Rogers we can use the git init Duck-Rogers command.

If you are in the Duck-Rogers folder and there are files in the folder then using the git init . command will do the same thing.

Verify Repository was Created

To check it is created we use the ls -la command:

Notice the last line. The d at the start tells you it is a folder (directory), and its name is .git. It is a hidden folder.

All tracking of changes are then stored in the .git folder. If you delete this folder, you delete the whole history of your project.