Practical Application

A clean setup sequence is:

1. Open a terminal.
2. Verify Git with git --version.
3. Navigate to the intended project directory.
4. Either run git init or clone an existing repository with git clone <repository-url>.
5. Confirm the repository state with git status.
6. When using git init, verify that the .git directory exists if you need to confirm initialization.

After cloning, inspect the downloaded files and run git status. The repository should already know its committed files and branch state because its history was included in the clone.