3 Tracking Changes (git add & commit)

The key commands for documenting changes are git add and git commit.

Key terms/commands:

• Commits: a “commit” adds your latest changes to your repository. If a change is not committed, Git would not recognize the change.

• git add: tells git which file’s changes you want to document. Formally, this is called adding a file to the “index/staging area”.

• git commit: tells git to document the changes you specified using git add (i.e., the files in the staging area), with an accompanying commit message that you have to provide to explain what changes were made.

While the process of adding and then committing seems redundant, overtime it will be apparent why we don’t always just commit ALL changes that have been made to your files, and how the ‘mandatory’ commit message creates a good documentation for your project.

3.1 Adding new files/modification (git add)

Make sure you are in the correct directory

cd ~/workdir

Make a new file foo.txt

touch foo.txt

Check the status

git status

## On branch master
## 
## No commits yet
## 
## Untracked files:
##  foo.txt
## 
## nothing added to commit but untracked files present

The status tells you foo.txt is not being tracked, and that you can use git add to start tracking it.

If there are untracked files, we would like to add those files so git will track their changes:

git add foo.txt

Check the status again, foo.txt should now be ready to get committed (a commit is a revision to your files).

git status

## On branch master
## 
## No commits yet
## 
## Changes to be committed:
##  new file:   foo.txt

The status now tells you there are “Changes to be commited”, and foo.txt is listed as a new file (in green).

3.2 Saving these changes to the repository (git commit)

Commit the file and note the identifier for this commit (e.g., f22b25e):

git commit -m "Add foo.txt to repo"

## [master (root-commit) 497ae8c] Add foo.txt to repo
##  1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
##  create mode 100644 foo.txt

The output of a commit will tell you what has changes has been commited to the repository. In this example, “1 file was changed”. There is 0 insertions or deletions as the file is empty. “create mode” means that a file is being added to the repository (first time Git is being told this file exist).

What have we done so far? Let’s check the log, which list all the commits made so far.

git log

## commit 497ae8c350bd3a4bbb830fd14f3d72f468cbaea1
## Author: Shady Whale <shadywhale@allthewhales.com>
## Date:   Fri Oct 29 14:24:30 2021 +0000
## 
##     Add foo.txt to repo

Each commit in the log is identified by a long unique identifier. The author (and their email) of this commit is listed Lastly, the commit message will appear under the identifier and author.

PRACTICE - Let’s add a line to the file and add/commit it

Add some text to the file foo.txt

echo hello >> foo.txt

Add & commit your changes to foo.txt

git add foo.txt
git commit -m "Add hello in foo.txt"

## [master dc6716a] Add hello in foo.txt
##  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

The output tells you that you have added 1 file and there is 1 insertion(+)

Check the status and log again using git status and git log

Notes

• Git does not track an empty directory, so until a directory has a file in it, git would not track it.

• If you want to correct the most recent commit message, use git commit --amend

---

You have now used Git to track the file foo.txt. You can use git log to read what you have done so far in this repository!