Terms you might come across

It can be very helpful to get a basic understanding of Git’s vocabulary. Although it can be confusing when other software mixes these terms up, knowing what they mean in the Git world allows you to work a lot more confidently, for example, when troubleshooting and reading error messages.

Here is an overview of the most common terms and what they mean.

Repository

This is essentially a “project,” the root directory of the code that is being managed and tracked by version control – the one containing the .git directory. A repository holds your source code and its history and changes.

Bare repository

This has a similar meaning, only that the code is not checked out. It matches what the .git directory contains. On servers hosting the repositories, such as GitHub, GitLab, sourcehut, or your company’s Gogs or Gitea instances, these are usually in a directory named project-name.git containing only what you...