Build Basics / Industry term
Repository (repo)
A repository, often shortened to repo, is a tracked folder that holds all of your project's files together with its full change history, kept in one place you can deploy from or share. Every saved edit is recorded, so the folder carries its own past, not just its current state.
A repository, often shortened to repo, is a tracked folder that holds all of your project's files together with its full change history, kept in one place you can deploy from or share. Picture a to-do app you are building: the pages, the styling, and the code that saves tasks all live in one folder, and once that folder is a repository, every edit you save is recorded as a labeled point you can return to. The repo can stay on your own computer or be copied to a hosting service so teammates clone it and a deploy platform pulls from it. Because the history travels with the files, anyone who has the repo also has the full record of how the project got to where it is.
Builder example
When you ask an AI coding assistant to build or change a project, it works inside a repository, so every edit it makes is captured as history you can review and undo. If the assistant rewrites a password-reset flow and the new version misbehaves, the repo lets you see exactly which files changed and step back to the last working state. Hosting the repo on a service also gives your deploy platform one trusted place to pull from, so the version you ship matches the version you reviewed.
Common confusion: A repository is the tracked folder plus its history, while version control is the system that does the tracking. You put a project under version control, and the repo is the result you then clone, share, or deploy from. One repo can hold many branches and commits inside it.