Initializing a Repository

Every Git project begins its life either by initializing a brand-new repository in an existing (or empty) directory, or by cloning an existing repository from a remote. Initialization is the act of telling Git 'start tracking history in this folder' — it creates the hidden .git subdirectory that holds the entire object database, references, and configuration for that repository. Understanding what git init actually creates demystifies a lot of Git's behavior, because nearly every other Git command is really just reading from or writing to files inside that one directory.

Running git init inside a directory creates a .git subfolder containing an empty object database, a HEAD file pointing at an unborn branch reference (typically refs/heads/main), and a default configuration file. At this point, no commits exist yet — the repository is initialized but empty. Any files already present in the directory are untracked; Git knows nothing about them until you explicitly git add them. You can also run git init <directory-name> to create and initialize a new folder in one step, and git init --bare to create a bare repository with no working directory, intended purely as a shared remote.

The objects/ directory is where blobs, trees, commits, and tags physically live, organized in subfolders named by the first two characters of their hash. refs/heads/ holds one file per local branch, each containing the commit hash that branch currently points to. HEAD is a special reference indicating which branch (or, in a detached state, which specific commit) you currently have checked out. config holds repository-local settings, and hooks/ contains sample scripts for hooking into Git events like pre-commit or post-receive.

git init creates a new, empty repository with no history and no remote configured. git clone, by contrast, copies an existing repository (including its full history) from a remote URL, automatically sets up a remote named origin pointing back to that URL, and checks out the default branch into a working directory. In practice, git init is used to start something brand new, while git clone is used to begin contributing to something that already exists elsewhere.