4 Areas of GIT

DevOps Introduction to Git

If you would like to become an expert in DevOps then mastering Git (version control system) is a must, but knowing the history and few commands is still not enough. It’s of primary importance to acknowledge the reasons why Git is worth all the efforts, how the command works; what happens when we run the git commands.

4 Git Areas

So, let’s understand the four areas of git that are Out of Git, Working Directoy, Index area and .git Directory. As many of you might not be familiar with these areas and the mechanism behind them,

The four areas of Git:

• Out of Git/Stash: Temporary storage area/like a clipboard
• Working Directory: It contains files you are currently working on — use, change or modify them.
• Index Area: This is the intermediate area that stores information about what will go into your next commit; files here are staged (e.g. ready to be recorded).
• .git Directory: The Git Directory that stores all states of your project you recorded, also known as commits — particular points, recorded as the project’s states in the history of Git.

File Statues

Workflow in four areas

Understanding how git works when we pass various commands or how data/files move in various directions:

Left to right -

When we talk about moving from left to right we talk about three things: edit the file, stage the file and commit the file. So we move the data from the working directory to the index and then to the .git repository.

Starting with the Working Area, it is the area where our files/data are currently present. When we make any changes to our files, the changes remain intact in the working area. If we check the status using git status

$ git status

Git says, Changes not staged for commit. The message itself says that in order to commit, we first need to stage the changes.

In order to stage the changes, we run

$ git add

Now the changes are status, let’s check the status

$ git status

Git status tells that the file is modified and Changes to be committed. We can also verify if the files are staged by checking the difference between the working area and Index area using command git diff. In the above screenshot, we see no result of the command git diff because there is no difference to show.

We can also check the difference between the Index and Repository using git diff --cached

$ git diff --cached

Now in order to move the files from the index(staging area) to the git repository, we run git commit

-m: m stands for the message, we can pass the message to the commit we are doing

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As soon as we commit the updated file is added to the repository. And all three areas contain the same data.

Right to left -

When we talk about moving from right to left here we talk about moving the data from repository to index and then to the working area.

We use the command checkout, it does two things. It changes the repository first and then moves data.

• In the repository, it moves the header reference, generally to another branch, so it changes the current commit.
• And the second thing it does takes data from the new commit, and it copies the data from the repository to the working area and the index.

In the above image when we checkout him then the head moves to his branch. The current commit is changed to him and copied the data to the index and working area

$ git rm --cached him

It will unstage the file and remove it from the index.

$ rm him

It will delete the file from the working area.

So till now, we discussed the functionality of Working area, Index area, Repository of git. Let's cover the fourth area that is stash.

The Stash -

We use git stash to store changes that are not ready to be committed and that meantime we need to change our branch in order to carry out some other work.

$ git stash apply

In the above image, we can see all the data in the working area and index which we wish to put aside in stash for some time.

So to save the changes in stash use the below command. It will take all the data from the working area and index that is not in the current commit in the repository.

$ git stash save

or

$ git stash --include-untracked

It will store all the untracked files by default

In the image below, we can see that our file chess.txt is not available as it is now successfully stored in the stash area.

Now let’s check our chess.txt is present in the stash area use the command

$ stash list

In the above image, we have only one element so it is stash@{0}

Now to get all our data in the working area and the index area back where it was before we stashed it. Use the below command

$ git stash apply

or

$ git stash apply --index

when there are multiple stashes

We can conclude Stash is like a clipboard; it is a place where it stores the stuff that needs to be set aside for some time.

Here we finished with the stash area. Hope you have a better understanding of Git working areas and their workflow.

Thank you for reading!