view: page

title: "22. Inside Git: .Git directory"

Goals

• To learn about Git directory structure.git

01 The .git directory

It is time to do some research. Starting from the project’s root directory...

Run:

ls -C .git

Result:

$ ls -C .git
COMMIT_EDITMSG    MERGE_RR    config        hooks        info        objects        rr-cache
HEAD        ORIG_HEAD    description    index        logs        refs

This is a special folder where all the git stuff is. Let us explore the directory.

02 Object Database

Run:

ls -C .git/objects

Result:

$ ls -C .git/objects
09    24    28    45    59    6a    77    80    8c    97    af    c4    e7    info
11    27    43    56    69    6b    78    84    91    9c    b5    e4    fa    pack

You should see a lot of folders named with two characters. The first two letters sha1 hash of the object stored in git are the directory names.

03 inquire the database objects

Run:

ls -C .git/objects/<dir>

Result:

$ ls -C .git/objects/09
6b74c56bfc6b40e754fc0725b8c70b2038b91e    9fb6f9d3a104feb32fcac22354c4d0e8a182c1

Let us look at one of the folders named with two characters. There should be files with names of 38 characters. These files contain objects stored in git. They are compressed and encrypted, so it’s impossible to view their content directly. Let us have a better look at Git directory

04 Config File

Run:

cat .git/config

Result:

$ cat .git/config
[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = true
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    ignorecase = true
[user]
    name = Alexander Shvets
    email = [email protected]

This configuration file is created for each individual project. At least in this project, entries in this file will overwrite the entries in the .gitconfig file of your main directory.

05 Branches and tags

Run:

ls .git/refs
ls .git/refs/heads
ls .git/refs/tags
cat .git/refs/tags/v1

Result:

$ ls .git/refs
heads
tags
$ ls .git/refs/heads
master
$ ls .git/refs/tags
v1
v1-beta
$ cat .git/refs/tags/v1
fa3c1411aa09441695a9e645d4371e8d749da1dc

Files in tags subdirectory should be familiar to you. Each file corresponds to the tag previously created using the git tag command. Its content is nothing but a hash commit attached to the tag.

The heads folder is almost identical and is used not for tags, but branches. At the moment we have only one branch, and everything you see in this folder is a master branch.

06 HEAD File

Run:

cat .git/HEAD

Result:

$ cat .git/HEAD
ref: refs/heads/master

There is a reference to the current branch in the HEAD file. At the moment it must be the master branch.