An OSTree repository is structurally similar to a git repository; it is a content-addressed object store containing filesystem trees. However, unlike git, ostree is designed to store operating system binaries. It records the Unix uid and gid, permissions, as well as extended attributes.
A repository can be in one of three modes; bare, which is designed as a hard link source for operating system checkouts, bare-user, which is like bare but works on systems that run as non-root as well as non-root containers, and archive-z2, which is designed for static HTTP servers.
There is a system repository located at /ostree/repo. If no repository is specified -- either by a command-line option or the OSTREE_REPO environment variable -- the ostree as well as many API calls will use it by default.
The only user-editable component is the config file. For more information, see ostree.repo-config(5).
ostree(1), ostree.repo-config(1)