Git Collaboration

This repository provides an exercise for practicing Git/Github collaboration skills. To complete this exercise, you will need to work with a partner to complete it. If you have not sure how to find a partner, please reach out to course staff for assistance.

For this exercise, one of you will be the "owner" of the repository, and the other will be the "contributor".

To fully complete this exercise, you will need to do the entire exercise twice, with each of you taking turns being the "owner" and the "contributor".

You may notice that this repository contains no files other than this README. This is intentional, as the focus of this exercise is on collaboration using Git and GitHub, rather than working with existing code.

Owner Forking the Repository and Adding Collaborator

1. The owner should start by forking this repository to their own GitHub account. You should be familiar at this point with how to do this. When forking, be sure to change the name of the repository to include your GitHub username to make it unique (e.g., "software-dev-course-git-collab-mlambert").
2. Once the repository is forked, the owner should clone their fork to their local machine.
3. The owner should then add the contributor as a collaborator to their forked repository on GitHub. To do this, you will need to get the GitHub username of your partner.

Contributor Cloning the Forked Repository

1. The contributor should clone the owner's forked repository to their local machine. The URL for cloning can be found on the main page of the owner's forked repository on GitHub.
2. The contributor should then create a new branch named contributor-branch in their local clone. This can be done through Visual Studio Code, or by using the appropriate terminal command.
3. The contributor should add a new file to the repository named contributor.txt. In this file, the contributor should add a single line of text that says: This file was added by [contributor's GitHub username].
4. The contributor should then commit their change and push the contributor-branch to the owner's forked repository on GitHub.
5. Once the branch is pushed, the contributor should create a pull request from the contributor-branch to the main branch of the owner's forked repository on GitHub.
6. The contributor should notify the owner that the pull request has been created.

Owner Merging the Pull Request

1. The owner should open GitHub, click on their inbox and review the pull request created by the contributor. (This means looking at the changes proposed in the pull request on GitHub.)
2. If everything looks good, the owner should merge the pull request into the main branch of their forked repository using the GitHub web interface.
3. After merging the pull request, the owner should open the repository in Visual Studio Code or a terminal and run a git pull to update their local main branch with the changes from the merged pull request.

Improving Your Understanding

To further improve your understanding of Git collaboration, try having both partners make additional changes to the repository on new feature branches and create pull requests for each other to review and merge. This will give you more practice with the Git collaboration workflow.

Consider and discuss how you might use this process to work with your team member on a larger joint porfolio project.

Conclusion

By completing this exercise, both partners should have a better understanding of how to collaborate using Git and GitHub. Feel free to reach out to the instructor if you have any questions or need assistance during the exercise.