The three places your work lives

Git work moves through three places:

1. Your working folder is the copy you edit on your computer.
2. The staging area is the short list of changes you have chosen for the next commit.
3. The repository history is the series of commits Git keeps locally.

GitHub is a remote copy of that repository. A remote lets you back up the work, share it, and review changes without handing someone your laptop. origin is the conventional name for the GitHub remote you work with.

git add moves a change into staging. git commit records the staged changes in local history. git push sends commits to GitHub. git pull brings commits from GitHub into your local copy.