Tracking and Ignoring

In a repo, we can specify which files to track and which files to ignore. Some files such a temporary log files created during the build/test process should not be revision-controlled.

Staging and Committing

Committing saves a snapshot of the current state of the tracked files in the revision control history. Such a snapshot is also called a commit (i.e. the noun).

When ready to commit, we first stage the specific changes we want to commit. This intermediate step allows us to commit only some changes while saving other changes for a later commit.

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Identifying Points in History

Each commit in a repo is a recorded point in the history of the project that is uniquely identified by an auto-generated hash e.g. a16043703f28e5b3dab95915f5c5e5bf4fdc5fc1.

We can tag a specific commit with a more easily identifiable name e.g. v1.0.2