Your first Git repository

Last updated on 2025-08-13 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How do we create a Git repository?
  • What are some of the basic Git commands?

Objectives

  • Create our first Git repository on GitHub.
  • Learn basic Git commands such as init,status, add, log, and diff.

Now that we’ve learned the basics of version control, and reasons to use it, let’s get some hands-on experience on how to create our first Git repository.

Let’s start navigating to the Desktop folder and creating a new directory there.

BASH 

cd
cd Desktop
mkdir gitgood
cd gitgood

Now that you’re in the new gitgood directory, we can start a new repository with the following command:

BASH 

git init

You should see a message like this:

OUTPUT 

Initialized empty Git repository in /home/username/Desktop/gitgood/.git/

If we try to list the files in the repository, we can’t see anything. Try again with the -a option:

BASH 

# This doesn't show anything
ls

# This shows the following
ls -a

OUTPUT 

. .. .git

We can see that we have created the .git directory. This hidden directory (hidden files and directories start with . character) will contain the Git repository, with all of the data that will be read and written by Git. If we delete this directory, we will lose all of the version control data stored by Git.

Challenge

Challenge

Hidden Files

Based on your previous knowledge of UNIX command line, try answering the following:
1. Why did the first ls command did not show anything?
2. What does the -a mean when we run ls?
3. If we don’t know what the -a, or any other command flags mean, how can we find out?
4. What do the . and .. files mean?

  1. By default, ls does not display hidden files (starting with a . character). The .git directory hidden by default when we create it.
  2. -a shows all of the files and directories, including hidden ones.
  3. If we don’t know what a command-line flag means, we can try looking for the command in the man pages, for example by typing man ls.
  4. The . and .. files respectively refer to the current directory and the directory one level above (the Desktop, in this case).

We can now try one of the most important Git commands, which tells us the current state of our repository:

BASH 

git status

OUTPUT 

On branch main

No commits yet

nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

We can use git status as much as we want to check the state of the repository. In this case, there isn’t anything very interesting, but once we start accumulating changes, it will become very useful.

Caution

Nested Directories

Once we have run git init on a directory, there is no need to run it again in subdirectories of the original directory. That’s why we should run the command on the parent directory of the project and we can include additional subdirectories as needed.

Key Points
  • git init initializes a repository.
  • Git stores all of its repository data in the .git directory.