You spent yesterday reviewing the command line and learning how to get help from Git. You also configured Git by telling it your name and email address. You saw in figure 1.2 of chapter 1 that Git gives each and every user the entire repository. Today you’re going to create your own Git repository by using the git init command. You’ll then add files into it by using git add and git commit. Finally, you’ll learn how to get your repository’s status and history with the git status and git log commands.
These are fundamental commands for working with Git! I hope you’ll see that creating a repository isn’t such a big deal, and that because repositories are so easy to create, it always makes sense to create one for tracking even trivial projects.
A repository is a specialized storage area in which you can keep track of your work. In chapter 1, I introduced in listing 1.1 a simple example of what an ad hoc repository might look like. Let’s gradually uncover this example to properly introduce the basics of a version control repository.
Let’s assume you have a build process that requires you to preprocess some files. Maybe you have to rename these files or add a timestamp to them. Let’s assume you’re on Windows, so you’ll use a Windows batch file (its suffix is BAT) to execute these steps.