Getting a Git Repository

This Post is part of a series about Git, Git concepts, commands and usage patterns to remind me and to help me learn. The first post of the series is Git - A New Years Resolution.

You typically obtain a Git repository in one of two ways:

1. You can take a local directory that is currently not under version control, and turn it into a Git repository, or
2. You can clone an existing Git repository from elsewhere.

In either case, you end up with a Git repository on your local machine, ready for work.

Initializing a Repository in an Existing Directory

If you have a project directory that is currently not under version control and you want to start controlling it with Git, you first need to go to that project’s directory and then invoke the git init command:

$ git init

This creates a new subdirectory named .git that contains all of your necessary repository files; known as a Git repository skeleton. At this point, nothing in your project is tracked yet.

If you want to start version-controlling any existing files, you should probably begin tracking those files and do an initial commit. You can accomplish that with a few git add commands that specify the files you want to track, followed by a git commit:

$ git add *.cs
$ git add readme.md
$ git commit -m 'initial project version'

At this point, you have a Git repository with tracked files and an initial commit.

Cloning an Existing Repository

If you want to get a copy of an existing Git repository (for example, a project you’d like to contribute to), the command you need is git clone.

Note: Unlike TFS or Subversion, the command is “clone” and not “checkout”. This is an important distinction. Instead of getting just a working copy, Git receives a full copy of all data that the server has. Every version of every file for the history of the project is pulled down by default when you run git clone. In fact, if your server disk gets corrupted, you can often use any of the clones on any client to set the server back to the state it was in when it was cloned (you may lose some server-side hooks and configuration, but all the versioned data would be there).

You clone a repository with git clone <url>. For example, if you want to clone the Git linkable library called someLibrary, you can do so like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/someLibrary/someLibrary

The above command creates a directory named someLibrary, initializes a .git directory inside it, pulls down all the data for that repository, and checks out a working copy of the latest version. If you go into the new someLibrary directory that was just created, you’ll see the project files in there, ready to be worked on or used.

Last modified on 2018-01-04