What is the Git Staging area (or index)? The Proposed next commit

About

The staging area is a tree file called index that stores information to create the next commit.

The index is like a pre-commit.

The index holds a snapshot of the content of the working tree.

You must use the add command to add any new or modified files to the index (ie staging area)

Command

Location

  • By default, the .git/index file
  • or the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable

Add (Staging)

Reset (Unstaging/Delete)

Git reset will revert the head to the last commit state.

git reset --hard
HEAD is now at xxxx commit

Print

git cat-file -p master^{tree}

Git - cat-file

List the files

For the next commit (staged)

git diff-index HEAD

In the index

To list the files the contents of the index with the stage information:

  • The mode of the file
  • The stage of the file (in next commit or not)
  • and the pathname of the file
git ls-files --stage
100644 70e413f03019cd301ebb955a3cc4d1ce9cad3cba 0       .gitattributes
100644 28a0ee7ed92f8962153865cf3eebf44e14c5c70e 0       .gitignore
100644 652381035ef9a14fdfb0e138ea33f2b777f1d06e 0       README.md
100644 7796e9eaf8ba750963df16029fd043b1905cbadc 0       conf/local.php
100644 cab897e88d877554458012df4447ea35f05dfb35 0       media/android-chrome-192x192.png
100644 6a4da3d8a25a9ba97b72d609c23ccc9fa8de43c4 0       media/android-chrome-512x512.png

To add file system information (modified date, …), add the debug option.

git ls-files --debug
100644 3eb4c7064f05a84ba975d45065b51114bcffef29 0       pages/slot_header.txt
  ctime: 1681850743:763163236
  mtime: 1681850743:763163236
  dev: 2049     ino: 155378090
  uid: 1002     gid: 1001
  size: 557     flags: 0

Commit

Restore

git restore to restore a file to the last state

Remove

With rm:

  • Remove a file from staging
git rm --cached path/to/file
  • Remove all files from staging area
git rm --cached -r .

where:

  • --cached remove the paths from staging and the index without removing the files themselves
  • -r operates on directories recursively.





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