Git - Staging area (or index) - Proposed next commit

The staging area is a tree file called index that stores information (file, directory, message, …) about the next commit.

The index is like a pre-commit.

The index holds a snapshot of the content of the working tree, and it is this snapshot that is taken as the contents of the next commit.

Thus after making any changes to the working directory, and before running the commit command, you must use the add command to add any new or modified files to the index (ie staging area).

• By default, the .git/index file
• or the GIT_INDEX_FILE environment variable

• Git - Add command (Staging) - Add a change to the next commit

• Git - Reset (Unstaging) - Delete a change for the next commit: as it was before

git reset --hard
# reset as the head from the root
git reset HEAD -- .

• Git - Commit

• Git - rm (Remove): Remove a file from staging

git rm --cached -r .

where:

• --cached remove the paths from staging and the index without removing the files themselves
• -r operates on directories recursively.