Git basics

Here is a quick refresher on the most important Git command-line basics. These are provided as a reference, not as step-by-step instructions – although we’ve written them so that you can follow along if you want to practice.

First-time setup

First things first: if you’re running Git for the first time on a machine, you may want to set a few global config options.

Set the default branch name to main:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Now configure your default name and email (attached to all of your commits):

git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Now you can initialize a new Git repository.

Initialize a new Git repository

Create a directory and enter it:

mkdir my-repo
cd my-repo

Now tell Git you want to initialize this directory as a new Git repository:

git init

Make and see changes

Create a file with some simple...