SYNOPSIS

git *

DESCRIPTION

You should work through gittutorial(7) before reading this tutorial.

The goal of this tutorial is to introduce two fundamental pieces of Git’s architecture—the object database and the index file—and to provide the reader with everything necessary to understand the rest of the Git documentation.

The Git object database

Let’s start a new project and create a small amount of history:

$ mkdir test-project
$ cd test-project
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in .git/
$ echo 'hello world' > file.txt
$ git add .
$ git commit -a -m "initial commit"
[master (root-commit) 54196cc] initial commit
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 file.txt
$ echo 'hello world!' >file.txt
$ git commit -a -m "add emphasis"
[master c4d59f3] add emphasis
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

What are the 7 digits of hex that Git responded to the commit with?

We saw in part one of the tutorial that commits have names like this. It turns out that every object in the Git history is stored under a 40-digit hex name. That name is the SHA-1 hash of the object’s contents; among other things, this ensures that Git will never store the same data twice (since identical data is given an identical SHA-1 name), and that the contents of a Git object will never change (since that would change the object’s name as well). The 7 char hex strings here are simply the abbreviation of such 40 character long strings. Abbreviations can be used everywhere where the 40 character strings can be used, so long as they are unambiguous.

It is expected that the content of the commit object you created while following the example above generates a different SHA-1 hash than the one shown above because the commit object records the time when it was created and the name of the person performing the commit.

We can ask Git about this particular object with the cat-file command. Don’t copy the 40 hex digits from this example but use those from your own version. Note that you can shorten it to only a few characters to save yourself typing all 40 hex digits:

$ git cat-file -t 54196cc2
commit
$ git cat-file commit 54196cc2
tree 92b8b694ffb1675e5975148e1121810081dbdffe
author J. Bruce Fields <bfields@puzzle.fieldses.org> 1143414668 -0500
committer J. Bruce Fields <bfields@puzzle.fieldses.org> 1143414668 -0500

initial commit

A tree can refer to one or more "blob" objects, each corresponding to a file. In addition, a tree can also refer to other tree objects, thus creating a directory hierarchy. You can examine the contents of any tree using ls-tree (remember that a long enough initial portion of the SHA-1 will also work):

$ git ls-tree 92b8b694
100644 blob 3b18e512dba79e4c8300dd08aeb37f8e728b8dad    file.txt

Thus we see that this tree has one file in it. The SHA-1 hash is a reference to that file’s data: