Initializing a repository

curl https://s2p2.github.io/jj-for-everyone/reset.sh | bash -s initialize

A repository is a directory where Jujutsu tracks all files and their history. For this tutorial, we'll use ~/jj-tutorial/repo. Don't put it somewhere else, otherwise some commands I tell you to run won't work later.

The command to initialize a new repository is jj git init <DESTINATION>. We use cd to change our working directory to the new repository. Copy-paste these commands into your terminal:

mkdir ~/jj-tutorial
jj git init ~/jj-tutorial/repo
cd ~/jj-tutorial/repo

Let's examine our first jj command. git is the subcommand responsible for various Git-specific compatibility features. One of them is the init command, which initializes a new repository that's compatible with Git.

This creates two hidden directories, .git and .jj, which store the repository's history and metadata. You should not edit these directories directly. You can see them with ls -a:

$ ls -a
.git  .jj

For this tutorial, we'll configure the repository with a specific author, "Alice". This overrides your global configuration for this repository only.

# applies configuration to a single repository only
#             vvvvvv
jj config set --repo user.name "Alice"
jj config set --repo user.email "alice@local"

# reset already recorded global authorship information:
jj metaedit --update-author