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A basic workflow with Tower

Working with a repository in Git & Tower always includes a couple of basic steps:

Basics steps

  1. Modify / create / delete files

    You create new files, edit or delete existing ones - and thereby change the status of your working copy. This step happens completely outside of Tower - typically in an editor application like Textmate, XCode, or Photoshop.

  2. Checking the status

    After having made modifications to your local files, you will want to see which files are concerned and maybe what modifications in detail you have made. For this purpose you typically perform the following steps in Tower:

    • Modifications can only occur in your repository's HEAD branch. This is the branch whose files are on your disk. Therefore, make sure the "Status" view is selected.

    • Select "Show Only Modified Files" from the "View" main menu or click on the "Status" tab and switch to its "Modified" view mode (on the right).

    • You then see a list with all the files you modified. In the list's "Status" column, the type of modification is visualized as an icon ("M" for modified, "D" for deleted, "A" for added, etc.).

    • To see the modifications for a specific file in detail, select this file - the bottom part of the screen will offer you different views of the file's contents and modifications.

  3. Staging changes

    Before you commit changes to your local repository you have to tell Git which of those modified files you want included in the next commit. In Git, marking a modification to go into the next commit is called "staging" or "adding to the staging area".

    • For those files that you want to have in your next commit, click the checkbox in the list's "Staged" column.

    • In addition to the checkbox being checked, the icon in the "Status" column changes from right to left: an icon on the right means that there are changes that have not yet been staged (added). An icon on the left means that the file contains changes that are staged (marked to go into the next commit).

  4. Committing changes

    You will now want to commit the just staged changes to your local repository.

    • Click the "Commit" button in the main toolbar.

    • Enter a short but meaningful message under which the commit shall be logged and click "OK".

  5. Viewing your commit in the history

    If you switch to Tower's "Commits" view you will see that a new commit was created in Git - with the files and the message you just chose.

After a commit, the workflow starts over again: modify, check, stage, and commit.