git-object-model

• Don't believe me that, behind its scary exterior, Git is just a bunch of plain ol' files?

• Let's give it a whirl. Create a workspace by clicking here.

• For your experimentation, commands that you will need:

  • To list the contents of the .git/objects folder,

    ls .git/objects -I "info" -I "pack" -R

  (Notice that the files are actually stored in subfolders that start with the first two characters of the digest, for performance reasons.)

  • To pretty-print the contents of an object with a SHA starting with e.g. 3b18e512 (the first 6 or 7 characters will do),

    git cat-file -p 3b18e512

• Create a new file called "first.md", commit it, and try listing the content of .git/objects.

• Use git cat-file to read each object. Add another file, commit it, and repeat.

• Explore the contents of .git/refs.

• Explore the .git/config file, which is the only file within .git that I actually edit by hand sometimes.