Non-bare and bare repositories

Objectives

Understanding the difference between non-bare and bare repositories.
Being able to create a common repository for a group on our local computer or server.

Instructor note

Non-bare repository

A non-bare repository contains .git/ as well as a snapshot of your tracked files that you can directly edit called the working tree (the actual files you can edit).
This is where we edit and commit changes.
When we create a repository with git init, it is a non-bare, “normal”, repository.

A bare repository contains only the .git/ part, no files you can directly edit.
By convention the names of bare repositories end with .git to emphasize this.
We never do actual editing work inside a bare repository.
GitHub, GitLab, etc. store a bare repository.
You can also create a bare repository on your computer/server to store your private repository.

If we have enough time, the instructor demonstrates how to create a bare repository on the local computer:

Bare-1: Create and use a bare repository

Create a new local repository with git init.
```
$ cd /path/to/example
$ git init
```
Populate it with a file and a commit or two.
Create one or two branches.
Clone this repository on the same computer with either --bare or --mirror:
```
$ git clone --bare /path/to/example /path/to/example-bare
```
Inspect the bare repository.

Clone the bare repository:

$ git clone /path/to/example-bare /path/to/example-clone
$ cd /path/to/example-clone

Inside the clone inspect git remote -v.
Inside the clone create a commit and push the commit to origin.
The bare repository can be cloned several times and one can exercise pushing and pulling changes.

Keypoints

We do programming work inside non-bare repositories.
We can create a local common bare repository where we can push to and pull from.