Initializing a Local Repository

We'll do some practice with Git by creating a dummy project. First of all, as we've talked about, you should keep a folder in your home directory called /code (or something) where you store all your code. From there, you'll have different folders for different projects. Go ahead and create a /code folder (if you don't already have one).

Now, open your command-line and navigate to your /code folder (or wherever you're going to keep track of your code). The command cd will change directories for you:

cd code

Now that you're inside this folder, we're going to create a new project by creating a new folder. Let's call it git-fun.

mkdir git-fun

As you can see, mkdir will make a new directory. Now let's view all the files/folders in our current directory:

ls

Or if you're using a windows machine:

dir

Now let's navigate into git-fun with cd:

cd git-fun

It's time to create a file. Let's start by merely creating an index.html file.

touch index.html

Or for windows users:

copy nul index.html

Now let's open this in VSCode:

code .

Perfect. Now we want to start tracking all of this with Git. To do that, use your command-line to write:

git init

As a response, you'll see (or something similar):

Initialized empty Git repository in /Users/aaronhayslip/code/project-shift/git-fun/.git/

Git has now implanted a hidden folder inside of this directory (/git-fun) called .git. This is the mechanism that will track changes in your files.

You can view this hidden folder in the command-line by writing:

ls -la