Git Fundamentals

Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes to source code across branches, enabling multiple developers to work concurrently and merge their history. It stores snapshots of a project's files, provides cheap branching, and operates fully offline.

itDevOps and software delivery

Git Fundamentals

Git is a distributed version control system: each ordinary clone contains the project files, the repository's reachable history, and references such as branches and tags. Most inspection and history operations are therefore local. A hosting service can coordinate collaboration, but it is not Git itself and it is not the only copy of the repository.

The useful beginner model is not “Git saves files.” Git records snapshots and relationships. A commit identifies a project tree, its parent commit or commits, author and committer information, and a message. Commits and file contents are immutable objects; names such as main, feature/login, and v1.0.0 are references that make selected objects convenient to find.

The four places you reason about

Day-to-day Git becomes predictable when you distinguish four places:

Working tree — the files you are editing.
Index, usually called the staging area — the exact file contents proposed for the next commit.
Current commit (HEAD) — the snapshot currently checked out through a branch, or directly in detached-HEAD state.
Remote-tracking references — local records such as origin/main describing the last state fetched from a remote.

Git Fundamentals

The four places you reason about

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