Learning the basics

The primary purpose of Git is to keep a history of changes, or revisions. To illustrate this, let's create a simple file and commit it to the history of the repository.

Committing to history

First, let's confirm our repository's Git history by running git log, which shows a history of past commits:

$ git log
fatal: your current branch 'master' does not have any commits yet

The error correctly informs us that there are currently no commits. Now, let's create a short README.md file, which represents the first change we want to commit:

$ cd ~/projects/hobnob/
$ echo -e "# hobnob" >> README.md

We've created our first file and thus made our first change. We can now run git status, which will output information about the current state of our repository. We should see our README.md file being picked up by Git:

$ git status
On branch master
Initial commit
Untracked files: (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
 README.md
nothing added to commit but...