38. Bare repos

Goals

• Learn to create bare repos.

A bare repository is a repository that doesn't have a working directory. It only contains the .git directory, the directory in which Git stores all its internal data. The main purpose of these repositories is to be a central repository that developers can push to and pull from, so there's no need in having a working directory. Bare repositories are also used in Git hosting services like GitHub and GitLab. In the next several lessons we will learn how to create a bare repository and how to push to it.

01 Creating a bare repository.

Run

cd ..
git clone --bare work work.git
ls work.git

Now we are in the repositories directory.

Result

$ git clone --bare work work.git
Cloning into bare repository 'work.git'...
done.
$ ls work.git
branches
config
description
HEAD
hooks
info
objects
packed-refs
refs

The convention is that repositories ending in .git are bare repositories. We can see that there is no working directory in the work.git repo. Essentially it is nothing but the .git directory of a regular repo.