init: git add

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In this video we'll learn how to track changes with git add

Once we have a Git repository we'll want to start tracking changes.

Changes are not automatically tracked by Git.

This is an important difference from other version control systems.

With Git, you have to specify which changes to track.

You do so with git add.

First, let's make a few files. I'm going to use the touch command to do this quickly.

touch file-1.txt file-2.txt file-3.txt

We can confirm they were created by running ls... And there they are.

Let's run git status to see the current state of the repository.

Git sees the files, but notice they are listed as untracked.

This means they have not been added to the Git repository and therefore Git will not track changes to these files.

Let's add File 1 by running:

git add file-1.txt

If we run git status, we now see File 1 has moved from untracked (in red) to ready to be committed (in green).

Git now sees File 1 as a new file to add to the repository.

We can add multiple files by running:

git add .

If we run git status again, we confirm that Git now sees all of the files.

There is more to learn about git add, but this is as far as we can go without covering other Git commands.