Committing Work

TLDR

• This is a beginner friendly guide on how to commit your work using Git for the first time!
• Commits can be thought of snapshots or checkpoints along the timeline of your project that you can go back to if anything goes wrong.
• Initialise or clone a Git repository with the git init or git clone command.
• Make changes.
• Stage changed files with the git add command.
• Commit staged files with the git commit command.

Pre-requisites

Pre-requisite	Importance	Note
Intro to Git	Necessary	This guide assumes you are using Git to version control
Using Git collaboratively	Helpful	Get started using Git as a team

What is a Git commit?

Git commits are the core building blocks of a Git repository's history. Commits can be thought of as snapshots or checkpoints along the timeline of a project.

Adding commits keeps track of your changes and progress as you work and each commit is a point in the project you can always go back to if anything goes wrong.

Snapshots are always committed to the local repository. Git doesn’t force you to interact with the remote repository until you’re ready.

How to make a Git commit

Initialise a Git repositoryClone a Git repository

To change your working directory to the project directory, open a terminal (e.g. Bash Terminal) and enter:

cd <project-filepath>

To initialise a Git repository for the project, in a terminal enter:

git init

To clone an existing Git repository, open a terminal (e.g. Bash Terminal) and enter:

git clone <url>

Make changes

Here is an example of creating a new README markdown file using the terminal:

echo "# Name of Repository" >> README.md

Stage files

To add untracked or modified files to the staging area, in a terminal enter:

git add <file-name>

Warning

You can also use git add . to add all the files that have changed - but use this with care - it's best practice to manually confirm each change to ensure it was intentional

Info

It is possible to skip the staging process and commit a file directly.

However, this is generally NOT recommended.

To find out more about why using "git add" is important, see this great guide by Github

Commit files

To commit all staged files, in a terminal enter:

git commit -m "Added README"

Useful commands

• Check which files have changed in a repository: git status
• Check the history of commits: git log

Info

You can escape from git log by pressing q

Useful links

• Git Basics - Recording Changes to the Repository
• Atlassian - Git commit

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Last update: March 1, 2024

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