Git Status

Whenever you make changes to your Git project, you would want to verify what has changed before making a commit or before pushing your changes to GitHub, for example.

To check the current status of your project, you can use the git status command. If you run the git status command in the same directory where you initialized your Git project from the last chapter, you will see the following output:

On branch main

No commits yet

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

As this is a fresh new repository, there are no commits and no changes yet. So let’s go ahead and create a README.md file with some generic content. We can run the following command to do so:

echo "# Demo Project" >> README.md

What this would do is to output the # Demo Project and store it in the README.md file.

If you run git status again, you will then see the following output:

Untracked files:
  (use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
        README.md
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

As you can see, Git is detecting that there is 1 new file that is not tracked at the moment called README.md, which we just created. And already, Git is prompting us to use the git add command to start tracking the file. We will learn more about the git add command in the next chapter!

We are going to be using the git status command throughout the next few chapters a lot! This is particularly helpful, especially when you’ve modified a lot of files and you want to check the current status and see all of the modified, updated, or deleted files.