Goal: Follow along with this lesson to see how changes are tracked using Git. We'll create a one-page website that says "hello" to the world. The steps we follow in this lesson will reflect the daily workflow we'll use when coding all of our projects. Use the details in the cheat sheet as reference for starting all of your projects.

Git Name and Email

In order to save code using the Git version control system, Git must have a name and email to stamp every time we take a snapshot of our work. We do this with a global configuration in the terminal:

$ git config --global user.name "Padma Patil"
$ git config --global user.email [email protected]

This sets the name and email for every save that is made in any directory anywhere on the device. If you are setting this on your personal device you will only have to set this once for it to be set on every project.

Starting a New Project

Whenever we start a new project, we create a new project directory.

If we enter ls at the prompt, we can see the list of what other files and directories are in our home directory. We need to decide if this is where we want our new project to be stored. If you are on your own device, you may want to create a new directory that stores all of the code you plan to create.

Creating a Project Directory

At Epicodus, we will create our project directories in the Desktop directory for easy access. Let's change directories from our home directory into our Desktop using the cd command:

$ cd Desktop

Now, we can add our hello-world project directory :

$ mkdir hello-world

Another ls shows that our hello-world directory was created. This is also mirrored by the new folder on the Desktop of our machines.

Let's change directories again so that we are now in the hello-world directory:

$ cd hello-world

To confirm that we are where we think we are, we can always show our location with a pwd:

$ pwd

Initializing Git

The next step before we create a single file for our hello-world website is to create a Git directory within our project directory that will track everything we add, modify and delete.

We do this by initializing a new Git repository:

$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/staff/Desktop/hello-world/.git/

Now if we do an ls, we might expect to see the new directory. But where is it? Directories beginning with a . are called hidden files and do not appear when you list the files with an ls. To see hidden files, we have to add a modifier to our ls command, -a which tells our terminal to list all:

$ ls -a
.git

On Windows you can use

> ls -force

There it is! The .git directory is a directory like any other. Let's cd into it and ls it's contents.

$ cd .git
$ ls
HEAD        description info        refs
config      hooks       objects

We aren't going to spend ANY time in this directory. The work done here to track our files is going to happen automatically. In fact, the reason the directory is hidden is to help ensure that we stay out of it to avoid making any changes to the very important work that Git will be doing for us. Now, as we add, update and delete files, Git will be in the background like a scribe, making notes of every change in our project directory.

So, let's return to the top level of our project directory by changing directories again, moving up one level:

$ cd ..

Now, we are ready to add a new file to our project. This will be the HTML page that will say "Hello" to the world.

$ git config user.name "Padma Patil"
$ git config user.email [email protected]

$ cd Desktop
$ mkdir hello-world
$ cd hello-world
$ git init