Working locally with git

Now we have worked out how to interact with an SVN repository, let's see how we can work with git locally.

Git has three "areas" you can work in:
- the working area - this is where you program
- the staging area - this is where you store the files that have changed and you would like to include in an upcoming commit
- the repository - this is where everything that has been committed is stored (and when I say everything I mean everything - every single snapshot you have committed is stored here)

The trick with git is to get files from one place to another satisfactorily.

Here are the basic commands to do that:

git status

set a list of changed files, files prepared for commit, and unfollowed files (you can make git ignore changes to certain files like target build files, and so on and so forth).

Once you have the status, you can check differences for any of the files listed in the staging are using:

git diff FILE_PATH

You can also add unstaged files to the staging area:

git add FILE_PATH

And vice versa

git checkout -- FILE_PATH

Once you have added all the files you want to the staging area, you can commit your changes:

git commit -m "my commit message"

You have just created a local commit.

We will see in some of the next posts how the data is stored and the powerful things we can do with local commits before sending them through to the central repository.

Thoughts?