Common Git Terminologies
Repository Repositories can be imagined similar to the folders in your system. A repository in Github contains all the project’s files including the documentation and all the revisions done on this project..
Branch Branch represents a line of development in the repository (be it local or remote repository). In other words, a series of commits of a particular project indicates a branch. A repository can have multiple branches.
Master Master is the default name of a repository’s active development branch. Unless explicitly specified otherwise, all Git operations are performed with respect to code on this default branch.
Commit The commit command is used to save the changes to your local repository. State of files at a given point of time in repository’s history is referred by a commit. In Git, it’s not like an autosave. For example, in Google docs, you make the changes and those are saved automatically. This does not happen in Git. You need to explicitly execute the commit command in order to save the changes to your local repository.
Push The process of uploading the recorded changes (commits) from local Git repository to the remote Git repository is called pushing.
Fetch Downloading code and commit history from remote Git to local Git repository is known as fetching. This process of getting the changes (that is commit history and the actual code) is called fetching.
Merge Merge operation is used to combine multiple commits into one single history.