Since software management is not officially part of this course, we will only cover the very starting basics of using git, just enough to be comfortable with getting your course materials from github and saving your homework.
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
GitHub is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git.
make sure that you have git installed.
initialize it (or it will complain the first time you do anything):
git config --global user.name "Whatever Name"
git config --global user.email whatever@whatever
It's not a good idea to download the .zip with the new material every day. Let's learn to get it to your computer properly.
Since the course resopitory is public, you don't need a github account to clone it. Click the green "code" button and copy the https link. Then, in terminal, go to the location you want the course folder to be and do
git clone THE_LINK_YOU_COPIED
in our case, it's
git clone https://github.com/sissa/ScientificPython_diploma23.git
Every day before the lecture (or when I tell you that I've updated the repository), you can do
git pull origin main
to update your folder.
Actually, .ipnb files are not really suited to be tracked with git as they are not "pure code". To avoid confusion and conflicts with the original files, I suggest to make a copy of each Lecture/Exercises notebooks and work in them, not the original ones.
Now make an account on github.
Once you have it, click on "fork".
Let's follow instructions on github.
Once you've added your private key to github, lets test it.
Go to your fork repository, copy the ssh link, then do (replace SOME_FORK_NAME with something, I usually call it "mine" for my forks)
git remote add SOME_FORK_NAME SSH_LINK_TO_YOUR_FORK
Do
git remote -v
You should see 4 lines now.
Create a folder for your homework now, add the notebook where you did the exercises yesterday to it.
Do
git status
It should show your file as "untracked". Let's tell git to track it, there is an add command for that.
git add YOUR_FILE
Now you need to "commit" the changes:
git commit -m "USEFUL MESSAGE"
git push SHORT_NAME_YOU_CHOSE_FOR_YOUR_FORK_REMOTE main
Check online if the changes got uploaded.
Since our repository is public, so are your forks. If you want your homework to not be accesible by anyone on the internet, you can make a separate private repository and keep your things there. Actually, it's a good idea to keep all your code for any projects backed up in some github repository.
Just go to github and follow visual instructions to create a new repository (choose "with README"), then
git clone YOUR_REPOSITORY.
add some text file to it
git push origin main (pushing to main is actually a bad practice - only for "trash/back_up repositories" and learning purposes, but we are doing an introduction, so it's ok)
If you are sure that your .gitignore is good, you can just do
git add -A
instead of adding files manually. Sooner of later you will push some trash like this, so only do it on your own repositories or if there are way too many files to add.
https://github.com/magicmonty/bash-git-prompt
git checkout -b development
edit your text file, add and commit
git push origin development
go to github and you will see a "create a pull request" (that's how things should get to main in real repositories)
git checkout main
git pull origin main (to update main after github pull request has been merged)
git checkout development
git checkout -b new_branch
edit the file again, add, commit, push to new_branch, switch back to development
git merge new_branch
check your text file
edit the file in development, add, commit, push
edit the file in new_branch, add, commit, push
now try, while being in new_branch,
git pull origin development
What happens?