Welcome back. In this lecture, we'll provide you with a quick-fire introduction to Git and how it can be used to manage your source code. We'll show you the basic structure of a Git setup and then provide you with details regarding all of the common Git commands and syntax. This lecture and the next one are intended to bring those who are unfamiliar with Git up to speed before we deep dive into Bitbucket itself. If you're already familiar with Git, feel free to skip straight ahead to the Bitbucket lectures. Okay, let's begin. Before we drop into any Git commands, we need to have a clear understanding of the overall Git workflow and the major parts within. Git, by its very nature, is a distributed version control system, therefore, some parts will be local and others will be remote. In this diagram, the main parts of the Git workflow are one, the Stash; two, the Workspace; three, the Index or Staging space; four, the Local Repository and five, the Origin Repository. You will most often be working and editing locally, moving files between the Workspace, Index or Stage and the Local Repository. 

Occasionally, you'll resync with the remote Origin Repository by pushing up and pulling down updates. Let's briefly discuss each of these parts now. The Stash. The Stash acts as a temporary storage area where you can transition out current changes you've made in your workspace so that you can work on something else. Stashing allows you to store coding changes that aren't yet completed and therefore not ready to be committed. The Workspace. The Workspace is nothing more than an area where you do your actual coding changes. The Workspace contains tracked files, untracked files and a special directory named dot git. The Index or staging area. The Index or staging area is used for preparing commits. Selected modified files within the Workspace are added to the staging area for the next commit. The Local Repository. Performing a commit will take all modified and staged files and place them into the local repository. Origin Repository. The local repository can be synced with the remote origin repository by pushing and pulling, or fetching. All except the Origin Repository are local, meaning that they exist on your local workstation. The Origin Repository typically exists elsewhere and is often communicated with across the internet. For example, products like Bitbucket cloud and GitHub act as a remote origin repository.

 When you clone from these remote origins, you pull a complete copy of the remote origin repository locally. Then as you go about making local changes to the codebase you will perform any number of Git tasks to manage the changes for you, ranging from staging the code using the git add command, committing the changes into the local repository using the git commit command and finally through to pushing the changes back to the remote origin using the git push command. As can be seen in the diagram, the various Git commands perform updates between various parts of the full Git distributed system. Okay, the Git introduction has now been completed. Go ahead and close this slideshow and we'll see you shortly in the next one where we present commonly used Git commands.