Welcome to our workshop’s journey into Git’s inner workings! Normally, when we start versioning changes in our projects, we rely on commands like git add and git commit to track our modifications. However, to truly grasp the magic behind how Git saves and manages these changes, we’re going to dive deeper and take a hands-on approach, doing it all manually, without relying on those commands.
Begin by creating a new folder on your computer. This folder will serve as your local repository.
Normally we would use command git init to set up repository and funcionalities locally, but for the learning purpose, we are going to setup a .git folder from scratch.
Lets make a git folder by using command mkdir .git, and it should now create an empty .git folder for us that can serves as “database”.
Lets check if this works as intended, run git status.
If you see fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git, don’t worry. Lets see what’s the problem here.
As we mentioned earlier, in our “git database” there will always contain:
A collection of objects
A system for naming those objects
Ok, lets make these from scrath.
Objects such as Blobs, Trees and Commits are stored under a folder called objects.
References or many of us calls it for branches are stored under .git/refs/heads.
Let’s make the folders and verify if it works now.
mkdir .git/objects
mkdir .git/refs
mkdir .git/refs/heads
git status
Not quite yet, because when we are running git status, git is trying to figuring out our current repo or status of the project. But since we do not have naming or objects available in the database, git is looking for HEAD but it is not available currently.
So lets make a HEAD and verify:
echo ref: refs/heads/main > .git/HEAD
git status
Now git status thinks that we are on branch main and we kinda achive what we are aiming for here.