practice-lab.md

🧪 Practice Lab — Basics Mastery

---

🎯 Objective

By completing this lab, you will:

• Create a Git repository
• Track files properly
• Use staging area correctly
• Make clean commits
• Understand history

---

📸 Visual (Workflow You’ll Practice)

---

🛠 Setup

mkdir git-basics-lab
cd git-basics-lab
git init

---

🧩 Task 1 — Create First File

echo "Hello Git" > app.txt
git status

👉 Observe: file is untracked

---

🧩 Task 2 — Stage File

git add app.txt
git status

👉 Observe: file is staged

---

🧩 Task 3 — First Commit

git commit -m "Initial commit"

---

🧩 Task 4 — Modify File

echo "New line added" >> app.txt
git status

👉 Observe: file is modified

---

🧩 Task 5 — Check Differences

git diff

👉 Understand what changed

---

🧩 Task 6 — Commit Changes

git add app.txt
git commit -m "Update app.txt with new line"

---

🧩 Task 7 — View History

git log --oneline

---

🧠 Internal Observation

After commits:

• .git/objects/ contains blobs & commits
• .git/index tracks staged files
• .git/HEAD points to current branch

---

🎯 Expected Outcome

• 2 commits created
• file tracked
• history visible

---

🔥 Bonus Challenge

Try:

echo "Another file" > notes.txt
git add notes.txt
git commit -m "Add notes file"

---

⚠️ Common Mistakes

• skipping git status
• using git add . blindly
• bad commit messages

---

🧠 What You Learned

• full Git workflow
• staging vs commit
• tracking changes
• reading history

---

🚀 Next Step

👉 Move to: 02-Branching/README.md