Using git

papers does not use git: it keeps its own history of each library for undo and redo (see Undo and redo), on your computer, outside the library. That history is a way to repair mistakes, not a record of your work: it is not synced, and it keeps a limited size.

If you want the history of your bibliography and PDFs, or to share them, put the library folder under git yourself, like any other project:

cd ~/projects/sealevel
git init
git add papers.bib files .papers
git commit -m "my library"

papers never commits to that repository, and leaves it alone.

The folder .papers/

The bibtex and the PDFs are your work. The folder .papers/ holds the internals of papers: what it keeps to manage them, which may change from one version to the next. papers writes .papers/.gitignore (with *), so that git leaves the folder out. A colleague who clones the repository runs papers init to make it a library on their side.

As git does with its own .git/config, each copy of a library has its own settings. To commit the configuration nonetheless (so that a clone is a library right away), make .papers/.gitignore:

*
!.gitignore
!config.json

papers does not rewrite a .gitignore you changed. What is in the folder:

file	what it is	without it
config.json	the settings of the library: where its bibtex and files are, its pool, the name formats, its identifier	set them again (papers init, papers config)
origin/	with a pool only: each entry as it was at the last pull or push, to tell who changed what since	the next pull asks about more differences
distinct.json	the pairs of entries you said are not the same paper	papers asks about them again
files.json	the checksums of the files, for undo	nothing: papers file checksum writes them again

Backups of earlier versions

Earlier versions of papers kept a git backup of each library: in the library, .papers/backup (the v3 branch before 3.0.0b4), or in a folder of the computer, ~/.local/share/papers/backups (papers 3.0.0b2 and earlier). papers no longer uses them, and does not delete them: papers history lists those it finds, with their size, and the command that deletes them:

stale: ~/projects/sealevel/.papers/backup (backup of an earlier papers, 641 MB, no longer used) — delete with: rm -rf ~/projects/sealevel/.papers/backup

Their history does not carry over: undo starts with the first command made with this version. The settings git and git-lfs, papers init --git, --git-lfs and papers git are no longer used.