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What is the difference between git add and git commit?

I understand that former adds to staging. But adding to staging means what?

Isn't it an additional step to first add to staging and then do a commit? In fact, it just doesn't end there, we also have to do a push to actually save our changes to the centralized repository. Am I missing any point here?

random
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Sandbox
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  • possible duplicate of [GIT add vs push vs commit](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6143285/git-add-vs-push-vs-commit) – random Jan 04 '14 at 23:46

3 Answers3

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The point of staging is picking the changes you’d like to be a part of a commit. It makes the commits cleaner, as it allows you to do several unrelated things at once and then neatly stage them into different commits as appropriate.

To sum up: staging picks changes to be a part of a commit, committing bundles changes into a separate standalone entity and makes them a part of the history, and pushing lets others know about the changes, making them more or less permanent.

It makes great sense to have all these operations separate, it gives you a lot of flexibility and freedom in your workflow.

zoul
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I will try to go step by step:

Imagine you have a repository A. When you do a clone you copy everything there is to your local repository clone AClone. Then, imagine you changed 3 files.
There are several steps you need to perform in order to share your changes with other users of repo A:
1. Stage the files you want to commit. (Imagine you want to commit only one of those 3). Staging in this case means "marking" them to commit.
2. Create a commit (an item that represent a change) which can be create with files that are staged (in your case one file).
3. This commit is created on your local copy of the repository and is not shared yet.
4. Last step is you need to "syncronize" your local repository clone (AClone) and remote (on some server) A, you do a push (git push). At this time git will try to create commits from your local copy (AClone) on the remote repo (A). This creates "pushing" effect, means your are "pushing" the changes to the server repository.

Hope this helps

Alex Denysenko
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They are two sides of the same coin:

  • Commits represent discrete units of work that you want to bundle together in the change history.

  • Adds are file-based actions you use to build up a commit.

This way you can add and remove files from a commit so that the commit itself makes sense--is a whole that can be understood down the line.

It seems like make-work until you are working on a more complex project. If you'd like, you can use git commit -a to do both steps together.

Alex Feinman
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