3. Checking the status of the repository

Goals

• Learn how to check the repository’s status.

01 Check the status of the repository

Use the git status command, to check the current state of the repository.

Run

git status

You will see:

Result

$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working tree clean

If you see On branch master instead of On branch main after running the previous command, it means that you have a slightly older version of Git, which didn't understand us when we asked to set the default branch name to main. In this case, you can rename the branch name to main with the following command:

git branch -m master main

The command checks the status and reports that there’s nothing to commit, meaning the repository stores the current state of the working directory, and there are no changes to record.

We will use the git status command to keep monitoring the states of both the working directory and the repository.