This 2 hour workshop will walk you through the basics of Git and GitHub.
- Install Git
- Create a GitHub account
- Understand what git is and why developers use it
- Understand repositories, the stage, committing, pushing and pulling
- Understand remote and local
- Understand Forking and Pull Requests
By the end of this section, students should have Git installed on their computers.
For installation instructions, please see here
Windows users will also need to install Git Bash
By the end of this section, students should have a GitHub account that they can work with.
Create an account on GitHub by going to https://github.com and Signing Up for an account.
By the end of this section, students should be familiar with what Git is and why it's important to learn.
Before we dive in to learning Git, it makes sense to spend some time understanding the reasoning for learning Git.
Git is a version control tool. It keeps track of changes (by line) across a collection of files. When we use Git, we can see what changes we made and seamlessly merge them with changes our coworker made.
If you've worked with track changes in Microsoft Word, then you're familiar with part of what Git does. Track changes will track any changes (inserted text, deleted text, etc) to a document. It will mark those changes by highlighting them in red or green. Git does this. It also does a lot more. For example, if you and your coworker are writing a memo using Word and managing your changes using track changes - how do you keep track of which version is the final version? A common solution to this problem is to make a copy of the memo and add your initials to the file name as well as the date and time so that you can keep track of different versions of the memo. Someone then has to manually add any changes you make to their version, or vice versa. What a pain!
Imagine if we had to do something like that with a codebase? The codebase for even a simple application can be many files. It would take forever and be extremely error prone! So, developers use Git - a tool to take care of that task.
You designate a folder for Git to watch (called a repository) and Git will track all changes to any document inside that folder. You then save your changes and push them to a central version of the set of files. Git tracks changes line by line and can handle merging changes between different versions of documents for you.
By the end of this section, students should understand what a repository is and how to create one. They should also understand how Git tracks changes to files, how to stage and commit changes and then push them to GitHub.
Create a repository: git init
Saving Changes:
git add -Agit commit -m "a commit message"Pushing changes:git push origin master
By the end of this section, students should understand how to work with remote repositories hosted on GitHub.
The remote version of the repository is the centralized version of the file system that everyone will work from. Any changes we make will need to be synced with the remote repository before our coworkers can see them.
By the end of this section, students should understand how to Fork a repository and make a Pull Request
We don't always want to give everyone direct access to the central version of our codebase - think of a contractor going rogue! So instead, we allow them to Fork the repository and make Pull Requests.
Forking a repository takes the remote/central version and makes a copy of it that we control. We can then clone that repository and work on the codebase - the forked version of the repository if ours. We can commit changes and push them to our fork. When we want to submit our changes (and get paid that $$$ for our work), we do so with a Pull Request on the original repository.
That's it for today! Here are some resources to further your understanding of Git: