> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.oxen.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# 📝 Track Changes

> Stage, commit, inspect, and undo changes in your local repository.

The day-to-day Oxen workflow follows the same shape as git: stage what's changed, commit it, and inspect the history when you need to.

## Stage Files

Add files to a repository with `oxen add`. This copies the files' contents to the repository's version store and stages the changes for commit. You can use absolute paths or paths relative to the repo root.

```bash theme={null}
oxen add path/to/file.txt
```

```bash theme={null}
oxen add images/
```

You can also stage matching files with glob patterns and wildcards. This stages everything that matches the pattern and isn't excluded by `.oxenignore`.

```bash theme={null}
# Adds all paths starting with an 'f' in the images dir
oxen add images/f*
```

```bash theme={null}
# Adds everything in the current directory
oxen add .
```

`oxen add` handles new, modified, and removed files and directories.

Oxen lets you version any data type — text, images, audio, video, parquet, etc. — in the same repository, and you interact with all of them through the same commands. Under the hood, Oxen stores type-specific [file metadata](/concepts/file_metadata) to power richer features.

## View Status

To see what is tracked, staged, modified, removed, or not yet added, use `oxen status`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen status
```

Output:

```
On branch main -> e76dd52a4fc13a6f

Directories to be committed
  added: images with added 8108 files

Files to be committed:
  new file: images/000000000042.jpg
  new file: images/000000000074.jpg
  new file: images/000000000109.jpg
  new file: images/000000000307.jpg
  new file: images/000000000309.jpg
  new file: images/000000000394.jpg
  new file: images/000000000400.jpg
  new file: images/000000000443.jpg
  new file: images/000000000490.jpg
  new file: images/000000000575.jpg
  ... and 8098 others

Untracked Directories
  (use "oxen add <dir>..." to update what will be committed)
  annotations/ (3 items)
```

Because Oxen is built for large datasets with many files, `status` rolls up directory-level changes and summarizes them.

You can paginate through staged files with the `-s` (skip) and `-l` (limit) flags. Run `oxen status --help` for the full list.

## Commit Changes

Once changes are staged, commit them with a message.

```bash theme={null}
oxen commit -m "Some informative commit message"
```

This creates a new commit on the current branch. If the repository was previously empty, this also creates the `main` branch.

After a commit, a copy of each file's contents lives in the repository's version store (by default `.oxen/versions/files`). File and directory metadata are stored in the [Merkle Tree](https://ghost.oxen.ai/merkle-tree-101/), which mirrors the working directory structure.

## View History

Show the commit history of your current branch with `oxen log`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen log
```

Output:

```
commit 6b958e268656b0c5

Author: Ox
Date:   Fri, 21 Oct 2022 16:08:39 -0700

    adding 10,000 training images

commit e76dd52a4fc13a6f

Author: Ox
Date:   Fri, 21 Oct 2022 16:05:22 -0700

    Initialized Repo 🐂
```

## View Diffs

Oxen can compute and display diffs between files using the [oxen diff](/concepts/diffs) command.

```bash theme={null}
oxen diff dataset.csv
```

This compares `dataset.csv` in the working directory with its version in the HEAD commit. You can also diff different files against each other, files across revisions, or whole revisions against each other. See the [diff concepts page](/concepts/diffs) for the full set of options.

## Restore Files

To revert changes you've made to a file in the working directory, use `oxen restore`. This restores the file to its version in the HEAD commit, and works on both modified and deleted files.

```bash theme={null}
oxen restore path/to/file.txt
```

You can also restore directories — `oxen restore` will recursively restore the files inside.

To restore from a specific commit or branch, pass `--source`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen restore path/to/file.txt --source COMMIT_ID
```

Like git, you can also unstage files (without changing the working directory) using `--staged`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen restore --staged path/to/dir
```

## Remove Files

To stage a file to be removed from the next commit, use `oxen rm`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen rm path/to/file.txt
```

The file must already be committed for this to work. If you want to remove a file that has not been committed yet, just use your shell's `rm` command.

To recursively remove a directory, use the `-r` flag.

```bash theme={null}
oxen rm -r path/to/dir
```

You can also remove entries from the staging area only — without deleting the file from the working directory — using `--staged`.

```bash theme={null}
oxen rm --staged -r path/to/dir
```