You can follow through the below instructions, and can refer to this video walkthrough if you’re stuck at any point -

For Crio Workspace users -

For Gitpod users -

All Git related commands start with the git keyword. One of the frequent commands you’ll use will be git status which gets you the current status of the Git repository. Try executing it.

Git would’ve told you something like this

fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

Not the best of welcome message you might’ve anticipated from Git, still it’s something for us to get started with.

The output from a Git command, if successful, tells us that it succeeded with some additional information, else it prints out details which can tell us why exactly the command failed. These details are very useful to address the error and run the command again.

The above message means that you are not in a directory which is part of a git repository.

You’d have your Git repository links from the setup task. Go to the HTTPS link (starting with https://gitlab) of the repository in your browser. GitLab would tell you it’s empty. Let’s download the "empty" repository to ~/workspace/bytes/ directory in our local system. Use the below command with the SSH link (starting with git@gitlab) to your repo to do this.

mkdir -p ~/workspace/bytes

cd ~/workspace/bytes

# Ensure you clone using the ssh link and not the https link

git clone <add-ssh-link-here>

The terminal will say Cloning into <folder-name>

The folder name will be of the format <username>-me_git_basics

Once done, you’d be able to see a new folder. Does it’s name have any correlation to the repository name? Is the new folder empty as GitLab told us or was it all a lie? (Hint: Hidden files)

Now that we have the same Git repository on our local system as on GitLab, the former will be referred to as the local repo and the GitLab one, remote repo.

Remotes in Git are usually places like GitLab & GitHub where we can share our code with others. Once you cd to the local repo folder, execute git remote -v to see something like this

$ cd ~/workspace/bytes/criotest003--me_git_basics

$ git remote -v

origin  git@gitlab.crio.do:COHORT_ME_GIT_BASICS_ENROLL_1596802014715/criotest003-ME_GIT_BASICS.git (fetch)

origin  git@gitlab.crio.do:COHORT_ME_GIT_BASICS_ENROLL_1596802014715/criotest003-ME_GIT_BASICS.git (push)

This just means that whenever Git says origin, it’s referring to the repository denoted by

git@gitlab.crio.do:COHORT_ME_GIT_BASICS_ENROLL_1596802014715/criotest003-ME_GIT_BASICS.git

Try git status again from inside the repo folder. Assuming you weren’t eager enough to have made any changes to the files or folders after cloning the repo yet, you'll get this output

On branch master

Initial commit

nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

• Line 1: Mentions that we're currently in a branch named master.What is a Git branch? Why do we need them?

• Line 2: Mentions that we are yet to make our initial commit

• Line 3: Mentions that you haven’t made any changes that need to be committed

Wait, wait! What does a commit mean?

We’ll see in the next milestone :)

For now, you have cloned a remote GitHub repository and you can access it on your machine just like a folder. You might also observe that there is a .git folder inside the repo. See if you can find out what this contains.