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In this article, we will learn about the staging area in Git .

Git is a version control system that maintains a history of changes made to a project directory. Git uses commits to track changes.

Git has three internal management systems, one of which is the staging area. The staging area is like a rough draft space where we can add versions of files that we want to save in the next commit.

We use the git add command to add files to the staging area. We will now illustrate this with an example.

Staging area in Git

Git is used in collaborative development environments to track changes made to files in a project directory.

Git has three internal management systems, also called trees: the working directory tree, the staging index tree, and the commit history tree.

These trees are complex data structures that manage the state of files and their changes in a Git repository. The staging area, also known as the staging index tree, tracks changes to the working directory.

The command git addcopies versions of files from your working directory to the staging area. git addThe command updates the index or staging area with the current contents found in the working tree.

The staging area stores a snapshot of the working tree content. This snapshot is used as the next commit.

Later, when we want to commit the changes to the Git repository, we need to use git committhe command.

git commitgit addThe git commit command creates a commit in the commit history tree using the snapshot created by the git commit command. The git commit command adds changes to the permanent snapshot located in the commit history tree.

The staging area is a complex internal cache mechanism. We can use git ls-filesthe command to view the staging area or index status.

git ls-filesWe can run commands in a Git repository .

$ git ls-files -s .
100644 bab2a0adb8921f504cb0521bc00b8dde22ee92a4 0    mynotes.txt

We can see that the mynotes.txt file is part of the staging area tree.

The -s or --stage option supplied to git ls-filesthe command displays additional metadata for the files in the staging index. The metadata is the mode bits, object name, and stage number of the staged content.

The second value, bab2a0adb8921f504cb0521bc00b8dde22ee92a4 , is a standard Git object SHA-1 hash. It is a hash of the contents of the file.

We can use git addthe command to add the changes to the mynotes.txt file to the staging area.

$ git add mynotes.txt
$ git status
On branch main Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD ..." to unstage)
modified: mynotes.txt

As shown in the output of the git status command, the changes to the file mynotes.txt were promoted to the staging index by git addthe command.

We will again check the status of the staging area or index for the mynotes.txt file as shown below.

$ git ls-files -s mynotes.txt
100644 067478ae06e267263ea7ed849ef358f911628668 0    mynotes.txt

We can see that the object SHA of the mynotes.txt file has been updated from bab2a0adb8921f504cb0521bc00b8dde22ee92a4 to 067478ae06e267263ea7ed849ef358f911628668 .

So far, we have learned about the staging area tree or index in Git .