git add

In the previous lesson, we used the following command to track the state of our project:

git status

>> On branch master

   No commits yet

   Untracked files:
     (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

          project-1.txt

git warned us that our project project-1.txt is not being tracked, and gave us a hint to use git add to initiate the tracking process. Let's do just that:

git add project-1.txt

Nothing seems to have happened. Let's try printing the state of our project again:

git status

>> On branch master

   No commits yet

   Changes to be committed:
     (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

          new file: project-1.txt

The message seems to have changed. Notice how git is showing us that the changed that need to be committed are in the new file: project-1.txt. The file changes are now in the staging area and are ready to be committed.

Staging multiple files

let's create two empty files:

touch file-2.txt
touch file-3.txt
ls

>> file-2.txt file-3.txt project-1.txt Then let's check the status of our project:

git status

>> On branch master

   No commits yet

   Changes to be committed:
       (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)
             new file:   project-1.txt

   Untracked files:
       (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

            file-2.txt
            file-3.txt

Based on the output above, git is not tracking file-2.txt and file-3.txt.

let's stage them, now we could use the following command:

git add file-2.txt file-2.txt

but that's a lot of writing, and can become annoying once you have a lot of changed files. We could use the prefix . to select all of the files at once:

git add .
git status

On branch master

No commits yet

Changes to be committed:
 (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

       new file:   file-2.txt
       new file:   file-3.txt
       new file:   project-1.txt

all of our files have been successfully staged.

Removing a file from the staging area

Let's assume that one of our files is not ready to be staged. We could remove that file from the staging area using the little helper git has provided us:

(use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

git rm --cached file-2.txt
git status

>> On branch master
   No commits yet
   Changes to be committed:
      (use "git rm --cached <file>..." to unstage)

          new file:   file-3.txt
          new file:   project-1.txt

   Untracked files:
      (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)

          file-2.txt

The file file-2.txt has successfully been removed from the staging area.

git rm --cached does not behave like your typical rm , it won't destroy your files. It will only remove them from the staging area.