phpman > man > gitrepository-layout(5)

GITREPOSITORY-LAYOU(5)                       Git Manual                       GITREPOSITORY-LAYOU(5)



NAME
       gitrepository-layout - Git Repository Layout

SYNOPSIS
       $GIT_DIR/*

DESCRIPTION
       A Git repository comes in two different flavours:

       •   a .git directory at the root of the working tree;

       •   a <project>.git directory that is a bare repository (i.e. without its own working tree),
           that is typically used for exchanging histories with others by pushing into it and
           fetching from it.

       Note: Also you can have a plain text file .git at the root of your working tree, containing
       gitdir: <path> to point at the real directory that has the repository. This mechanism is
       often used for a working tree of a submodule checkout, to allow you in the containing
       superproject to git checkout a branch that does not have the submodule. The checkout has to
       remove the entire submodule working tree, without losing the submodule repository.

       These things may exist in a Git repository.

       objects
           Object store associated with this repository. Usually an object store is self sufficient
           (i.e. all the objects that are referred to by an object found in it are also found in
           it), but there are a few ways to violate it.

            1. You could have an incomplete but locally usable repository by creating a shallow
               clone. See git-clone(1).

            2. You could be using the objects/info/alternates or $GIT_ALTERNATE_OBJECT_DIRECTORIES
               mechanisms to borrow objects from other object stores. A repository with this kind of
               incomplete object store is not suitable to be published for use with dumb transports
               but otherwise is OK as long as objects/info/alternates points at the object stores it
               borrows from.

               This directory is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/objects"
               will be used instead.

       objects/[0-9a-f][0-9a-f]
           A newly created object is stored in its own file. The objects are splayed over 256
           subdirectories using the first two characters of the sha1 object name to keep the number
           of directory entries in objects itself to a manageable number. Objects found here are
           often called unpacked (or loose) objects.

       objects/pack
           Packs (files that store many objects in compressed form, along with index files to allow
           them to be randomly accessed) are found in this directory.

       objects/info
           Additional information about the object store is recorded in this directory.

       objects/info/packs
           This file is to help dumb transports discover what packs are available in this object
           store. Whenever a pack is added or removed, git update-server-info should be run to keep
           this file up to date if the repository is published for dumb transports.  git repack does
           this by default.

       objects/info/alternates
           This file records paths to alternate object stores that this object store borrows objects
           from, one pathname per line. Note that not only native Git tools use it locally, but the
           HTTP fetcher also tries to use it remotely; this will usually work if you have relative
           paths (relative to the object database, not to the repository!) in your alternates file,
           but it will not work if you use absolute paths unless the absolute path in filesystem and
           web URL is the same. See also objects/info/http-alternates.

       objects/info/http-alternates
           This file records URLs to alternate object stores that this object store borrows objects
           from, to be used when the repository is fetched over HTTP.

       refs
           References are stored in subdirectories of this directory. The git prune command knows to
           preserve objects reachable from refs found in this directory and its subdirectories. This
           directory is ignored (except refs/bisect, refs/rewritten and refs/worktree) if
           $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/refs" will be used instead.

       refs/heads/name
           records tip-of-the-tree commit objects of branch name

       refs/tags/name
           records any object name (not necessarily a commit object, or a tag object that points at
           a commit object).

       refs/remotes/name
           records tip-of-the-tree commit objects of branches copied from a remote repository.

       refs/replace/<obj-sha1>
           records the SHA-1 of the object that replaces <obj-sha1>. This is similar to info/grafts
           and is internally used and maintained by git-replace(1). Such refs can be exchanged
           between repositories while grafts are not.

       packed-refs
           records the same information as refs/heads/, refs/tags/, and friends record in a more
           efficient way. See git-pack-refs(1). This file is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and
           "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/packed-refs" will be used instead.

       HEAD
           A symref (see glossary) to the refs/heads/ namespace describing the currently active
           branch. It does not mean much if the repository is not associated with any working tree
           (i.e. a bare repository), but a valid Git repository must have the HEAD file; some
           porcelains may use it to guess the designated "default" branch of the repository (usually
           master). It is legal if the named branch name does not (yet) exist. In some legacy
           setups, it is a symbolic link instead of a symref that points at the current branch.

           HEAD can also record a specific commit directly, instead of being a symref to point at
           the current branch. Such a state is often called detached HEAD.  See git-checkout(1) for
           details.

       config
           Repository specific configuration file. This file is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set
           and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/config" will be used instead.

       config.worktree
           Working directory specific configuration file for the main working directory in multiple
           working directory setup (see git-worktree(1)).

       branches
           A slightly deprecated way to store shorthands to be used to specify a URL to git fetch,
           git pull and git push. A file can be stored as branches/<name> and then name can be given
           to these commands in place of repository argument. See the REMOTES section in git-
           fetch(1) for details. This mechanism is legacy and not likely to be found in modern
           repositories. This directory is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and
           "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/branches" will be used instead.

       hooks
           Hooks are customization scripts used by various Git commands. A handful of sample hooks
           are installed when git init is run, but all of them are disabled by default. To enable,
           the .sample suffix has to be removed from the filename by renaming. Read githooks(5) for
           more details about each hook. This directory is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and
           "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/hooks" will be used instead.

       common
           When multiple working trees are used, most of files in $GIT_DIR are per-worktree with a
           few known exceptions. All files under common however will be shared between all working
           trees.

       index
           The current index file for the repository. It is usually not found in a bare repository.

       sharedindex.<SHA-1>
           The shared index part, to be referenced by $GIT_DIR/index and other temporary index
           files. Only valid in split index mode.

       info
           Additional information about the repository is recorded in this directory. This directory
           is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/info" will be used instead.

       info/refs
           This file helps dumb transports discover what refs are available in this repository. If
           the repository is published for dumb transports, this file should be regenerated by git
           update-server-info every time a tag or branch is created or modified. This is normally
           done from the hooks/update hook, which is run by the git-receive-pack command when you
           git push into the repository.

       info/grafts
           This file records fake commit ancestry information, to pretend the set of parents a
           commit has is different from how the commit was actually created. One record per line
           describes a commit and its fake parents by listing their 40-byte hexadecimal object names
           separated by a space and terminated by a newline.

           Note that the grafts mechanism is outdated and can lead to problems transferring objects
           between repositories; see git-replace(1) for a more flexible and robust system to do the
           same thing.

       info/exclude
           This file, by convention among Porcelains, stores the exclude pattern list.  .gitignore
           is the per-directory ignore file.  git status, git add, git rm and git clean look at it
           but the core Git commands do not look at it. See also: gitignore(5).

       info/attributes
           Defines which attributes to assign to a path, similar to per-directory .gitattributes
           files. See also: gitattributes(5).

       info/sparse-checkout
           This file stores sparse checkout patterns. See also: git-read-tree(1).

       remotes
           Stores shorthands for URL and default refnames for use when interacting with remote
           repositories via git fetch, git pull and git push commands. See the REMOTES section in
           git-fetch(1) for details. This mechanism is legacy and not likely to be found in modern
           repositories. This directory is ignored if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and
           "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/remotes" will be used instead.

       logs
           Records of changes made to refs are stored in this directory. See git-update-ref(1) for
           more information. This directory is ignored (except logs/HEAD) if $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set
           and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/logs" will be used instead.

       logs/refs/heads/name
           Records all changes made to the branch tip named name.

       logs/refs/tags/name
           Records all changes made to the tag named name.

       shallow
           This is similar to info/grafts but is internally used and maintained by shallow clone
           mechanism. See --depth option to git-clone(1) and git-fetch(1). This file is ignored if
           $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set and "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/shallow" will be used instead.

       commondir
           If this file exists, $GIT_COMMON_DIR (see git(1)) will be set to the path specified in
           this file if it is not explicitly set. If the specified path is relative, it is relative
           to $GIT_DIR. The repository with commondir is incomplete without the repository pointed
           by "commondir".

       modules
           Contains the git-repositories of the submodules.

       worktrees
           Contains administrative data for linked working trees. Each subdirectory contains the
           working tree-related part of a linked working tree. This directory is ignored if
           $GIT_COMMON_DIR is set, in which case "$GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees" will be used instead.

       worktrees/<id>/gitdir
           A text file containing the absolute path back to the .git file that points to here. This
           is used to check if the linked repository has been manually removed and there is no need
           to keep this directory any more. The mtime of this file should be updated every time the
           linked repository is accessed.

       worktrees/<id>/locked
           If this file exists, the linked working tree may be on a portable device and not
           available. The presence of this file prevents worktrees/<id> from being pruned either
           automatically or manually by git worktree prune. The file may contain a string explaining
           why the repository is locked.

       worktrees/<id>/config.worktree
           Working directory specific configuration file.

GIT REPOSITORY FORMAT VERSIONS
       Every git repository is marked with a numeric version in the core.repositoryformatversion key
       of its config file. This version specifies the rules for operating on the on-disk repository
       data. An implementation of git which does not understand a particular version advertised by
       an on-disk repository MUST NOT operate on that repository; doing so risks not only producing
       wrong results, but actually losing data.

       Because of this rule, version bumps should be kept to an absolute minimum. Instead, we
       generally prefer these strategies:

       •   bumping format version numbers of individual data files (e.g., index, packfiles, etc).
           This restricts the incompatibilities only to those files.

       •   introducing new data that gracefully degrades when used by older clients (e.g., pack
           bitmap files are ignored by older clients, which simply do not take advantage of the
           optimization they provide).

       A whole-repository format version bump should only be part of a change that cannot be
       independently versioned. For instance, if one were to change the reachability rules for
       objects, or the rules for locking refs, that would require a bump of the repository format
       version.

       Note that this applies only to accessing the repository’s disk contents directly. An older
       client which understands only format 0 may still connect via git:// to a repository using
       format 1, as long as the server process understands format 1.

       The preferred strategy for rolling out a version bump (whether whole repository or for a
       single file) is to teach git to read the new format, and allow writing the new format with a
       config switch or command line option (for experimentation or for those who do not care about
       backwards compatibility with older gits). Then after a long period to allow the reading
       capability to become common, we may switch to writing the new format by default.

       The currently defined format versions are:

   Version 0
       This is the format defined by the initial version of git, including but not limited to the
       format of the repository directory, the repository configuration file, and the object and ref
       storage. Specifying the complete behavior of git is beyond the scope of this document.

   Version 1
       This format is identical to version 0, with the following exceptions:

        1. When reading the core.repositoryformatversion variable, a git implementation which
           supports version 1 MUST also read any configuration keys found in the extensions section
           of the configuration file.

        2. If a version-1 repository specifies any extensions.*  keys that the running git has not
           implemented, the operation MUST NOT proceed. Similarly, if the value of any known key is
           not understood by the implementation, the operation MUST NOT proceed.

       Note that if no extensions are specified in the config file, then
       core.repositoryformatversion SHOULD be set to 0 (setting it to 1 provides no benefit, and
       makes the repository incompatible with older implementations of git).

       This document will serve as the master list for extensions. Any implementation wishing to
       define a new extension should make a note of it here, in order to claim the name.

       The defined extensions are:

       noop
           This extension does not change git’s behavior at all. It is useful only for testing
           format-1 compatibility.

       preciousObjects
           When the config key extensions.preciousObjects is set to true, objects in the repository
           MUST NOT be deleted (e.g., by git-prune or git repack -d).

       partialclone
           When the config key extensions.partialclone is set, it indicates that the repo was
           created with a partial clone (or later performed a partial fetch) and that the remote may
           have omitted sending certain unwanted objects. Such a remote is called a "promisor
           remote" and it promises that all such omitted objects can be fetched from it in the
           future.

           The value of this key is the name of the promisor remote.

       worktreeConfig
           If set, by default "git config" reads from both "config" and "config.worktree" file from
           GIT_DIR in that order. In multiple working directory mode, "config" file is shared while
           "config.worktree" is per-working directory (i.e., it’s in
           GIT_COMMON_DIR/worktrees/<id>/config.worktree)

SEE ALSO
       git-init(1), git-clone(1), git-fetch(1), git-pack-refs(1), git-gc(1), git-checkout(1),
       gitglossary(7), The Git User’’s Manual[1]

GIT
       Part of the git(1) suite

NOTES
        1. The Git User’s Manual
           file:///usr/share/doc/git/html/user-manual.html



Git 2.34.1                                   02/26/2026                       GITREPOSITORY-LAYOU(5)