OK, I installed it... now how do I USE it?

Install/Maintain/Configure
1

I understand the very basics of version control but I’m new to (g)it. There’s a ton of tutorials on INSTALLING Gitea but finding a tutorial on how to actually USE it is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

I want to use Gitea for developing a website. I have a little (web) server setup and I installed Gitea on it. I’ve also installed git on my main (Linux) workstation. I’ve watched some good videos that explain what git does and what the basic commands are. But I haven’t found any tutorials that will walk a noobie like me through the practical aspects of actually USING git with Gitea, and I can’t figure out/wrap my head around…

  1. When I want to open index.html in git on my workstation, how is git supposed to know to get the file from Gitea on my server?
  2. Once it gets it from Gitea on my server, how does it know to open it in my favorite code editor?
  3. When I save changes to the file in my code editor, Is the file automatically updated in the repository?
  4. How do updated files get from the repository/database to the directory on the web server where they’ll be served from?
  5. Can the directory where all my source files are stored (dev branch, obviously) actually be used as the repository so changes are automatically live?

Please talk to me like I’m 2 (or 60) when explaining this stuff. Many thanks for your time and patience with an old timer.

2

You need to find a tutorial of using Git with GitHub (or GItLab) and replace all references with those to ‘Gitea’ instead; this will teach you how Git works with a repository server.

Also, it appears that you want to actually host the website from the repository in the Gitea server; this is really not possible, as the repository inside the Gitea server won’t actually have any visible copies of your files. When using Git for a website, you’ll need Git installed on the web server too (which you probably have since you installed Gitea there) and you’ll need some sort of automated process to grab a copy of your branch and make it visible to the web server software.

There are literally thousands of ways to accomplish this, depending on many variables, so it’s really not practical to give you direct steps to follow.

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