Subsequent workflow

Once you’ve set up the remote repository, subsequent updates follow a similar pattern:

• Add or make changes to files in your project
• Stage the new/modified files: git add
• Commit your changes: git commit
• Push your local changes to the remote repository: git push

Making sure your repository is up-to-date

At any point you can use git status to find out the current state of your repository. If you have made a local commit that has not yet been pushed to the remote repository, git status will display a message indicating that your local branch is ahead of origin/master (the remote branch). Use

git push

to bring the remote repository up-to-date.

Other ways to get started: cloning a repository

Rather than initialising a local repository, you can start your project by cloning a remote repository from GitHub.

Cloning a remote repository creates a new copy of the repository on your computer. For example, if you have created a repository on GitHub called new-repo you can set up a local copy by entering:

git clone https://github.com/username/new-repo.git

This will create a local repository in a directory called new-repo and populate it with the contents of the remote repository.

If you’ve only just created the repository on GitHub, running git clone will generate a warning that you’ve cloned an empty repository. This is just to remind you that you’ll need to add files and create an initial commit before you have a version controlled project.

Next: When things go wrong