In this movie we're going to talk about how to add files to you Git repository.
Now we already did that once we did that when we did our initial commit, but now
we have a better understanding of the Git architecture and how that works.
So I want us to revisit again, and we'll get some more insights.
If you remember that we have our Git project here, and I have first_file.txt,
which I've already committed during my initial commit.
In the command line I'm in that same project directory and the first Git
command that I want us to learn is git status. Git status is going to report
back to us the difference between our working directory, the staging index, and
the repository. It's going to let us know, what is the status between those
three different trees?
Right now, it says we're on branch master we talked about that the default
branch is called master. We're going to be working on master all the way up
until we start talking about creating new branches, so you can pretty much just
ignore that, we're on the master branch.
And it tell us there is nothing to commit our working directory is clean,
that's letting us know that there's nothing in the staging directory and the
working directory exactly matches what is in the repository and the current
branch where the HEAD pointer points to that exactly the same things that we
have in our working directory. Now let's add some files.
So in order to put some new files inside this project I'm just going to open up
my text editor, I'll create a new file we'll call, This is a second file, and
I'll save that as second_file.txt, and I'll just save it to my desktop and then
let's go ahead and make another one here, this is a third file, and we'll do
Save As third_file.txt.
So now I've got two file second file and third file, and I'm just going to drag
both of those into my project.
So now I've added two new files to the project, let's do git status again and
see what Git tells us about it.
Now Git tells us that there is a section called untracked file. Essentially what
Git saying is, I have information about what's in the repository, and I can see
your working directory.
Your working directory has some new things, they're things that I'm not
currently tracking. That is, if you make text edits to these, I'm not going to
be able to tell you information about what changed because I'm not currently tracking these.
And then it helpfully tells us that if we want to add them we use git add
followed by the file name to include what will be committed.
Now if we want to include one file we just say git add and the first file name. If we want
to include multiple files we can say git add one file name after another, or as
we saw before, we could just do git add with a dot to add everything that's in this directory.
Now we are not going to do that this time, we're going to go ahead and list it out.
If I start typing the name of the file then hit Tab it'll auto-complete it for me,
git add second_file.txt, I'm going to tell it to add it to my staging directory.
Remember how we did that with the illustration, we move it from the working
directory into the staging directory with git add.
Now when I do git status, let me clear the screen just so it's clearer between the two.
Now it tells me two different sections, it say changes to be committed, that is
my staging index that's things that are being staged and ready to be committed.
You can see that here because it also tells us helpfully what the command is to
unstage things, to take them out of the staging index. And then we still have
our untracked files down here, these have not been added yet, these are just in
our working directory.
One file is now in my staging index, one file is still in my working directory.
Now let's do a commit.
So we're going to commit, remember the command for commit it just git commit, and
then we want to provide a message, so -m and then in quotes we'll put our message,
Add second file to project.
So that's going to be the message that goes with my commit.
Now, what is it going to commit here?
It's going to commit what's in my staging index, I've staged things to be
committed so that's what gets committed.
So now it makes my commit, gives me the commit message, gives me the first part of
the SHA back so I can see that.
And then it tell me some information about what changed, about sort of the
amount of things that were changed. We don't have to worry too much about that.
Now let's do git status and see what it tells us, git status, I'll clear it just
so that's easy to see the difference.
Now it no longer reports anything about second file, because second file has
been added to our repository, it doesn't tell us anything about it if what
we have in our working directory is exactly the same, it's just reporting
the differences to us.
And the difference here is that there's a third file and third file is not
tracked still, it didn't get added in my commit it got left in my working
directory, only the thing that I staged got put into the commit.
If we do a git log, I'll clear the screen again just so it's nice and clear,
you'll see that here's my second commit with my second message right after my initial commit.
So they're always going to be in reverse chronological order the oldest ones
will fall further down the list the most recent things will be at the top.
Now of course, if we want to git status again if you want to add third file to
our repository git add third_file.txt.
Now that's going to be in our staging index, see it there, changes to be committed
git commit with another message add third file to your project.
Now of course, you would probably be doing something more descriptive than what we're
doing with these sample files, but now you can see an example of this third file
being committed, git status, now it'll report to us that there's nothing to
commit, our working directory is clean, git log shows us all three of those
comments, and we have all three of the files in our projects.
So these three files are now in the repository exactly as they are in our
working directory, the two are exactly the same, and if we made changes to them
it reported to us using git status.
In the next movie that's what we'll do, we will see how to make changes to these
files and how those get reported and how we commit those changes.