Adding files to a local repository.

Now that we have initialized an empty repository, lets add a couple of files and use Git to index them. For this excercise, we will add a README and LICENSE file to our empty directory. Don't worry about the file contents for now, empty files will do.

cd /home/username/project
touch README
touch LICENSE

Next, lets ask Git what it thinks of the status of our directory:

git status -s
?? LICENSE
?? README

It looks like Git is unsure about the newly discovered files. We can tell Git to index our files by adding them to the local index:

git add README LICENSE 

And now we can see what Git thinks about the directory contents:

git status -s
A  README
A  LICENSE

Alternatively, we can use the following commands to add all files in a directory or all files in a directory tree recursively:

git add .

git add ..

The only difference is the number of dots. One dot for the current working directory and two dots for the current working directory and all sub-directories.

Further Reading

Git Manual: add

Git Reference: Basic