GetToGit

git is a version control system: it lets you control the version of things. It also lets you collaborate with other people, track what you have been doing on a code, keep backup, and a lot of other cool and useful and productive things. It's extremely useful for

i) people working with code ii) people working on manuscripts (if you write them in LaTeX or markdown, which you should)

Using git is really straightforward, but require to use the command line. During the trainign session, we'll go through the different commands we need to use. We'll also keep on updating this document, and turn it into a page for the group wiki.

Creating a project on github

The first thing to do is to go on github and create a project. With your free account, you can only create open projects (everyone can see what you are doing). The lab also has an account, with some private projects. Only the holy trinity of super users (Dom, Philippe, and Tim) can create these projects.

Setting things up on your computer

If you want to clone this project (it's formally called a repository, or repo for short), there are two solutions. First, you don't want to contribute, you only want to get the content:

git clone git://github.com/tpoisot/GetToGit.git

This line will create a folder called GetToGit in whichever folder you are currently into with your terminal. You can then cd GetToGit to go into the folder.

The other situation is that you want to collaborate on the project. To do that, you need to (i) know the address of the repo, and (ii) make sure that you have the rights to access it. In the case of a private (lab) repo, it means sending Tim an email with your project name, and getting a URL and the access back.

If everything is fine, you can just type

git clone https://github.com/tpoisot/GetToGit.git

The only thing that changed is that we access a secure version of the repository, so we'll be able to send changes to it.

At this point, if you ls -la in the repository, you should see a README.md file (github creates those for you), and a folder called .git. Don't go there.

Putting your code in the folder

Once you have cloned the repo, you can start adding your code/manuscript. Just mv, cp, or drag-and-drop everything in the folder. Now, you can start using git. To see if anything happened, just type

git status

You should see a lot of things going on. Let's walk through them.

Sending your code to the server

The first thing you need to do is to tell git which files he should monitor for change. The command is relatively simple:

git add myfile.ext

Try to do a git status immediately after, and see what changed. If you want to add a lot of files at once (you just copied your project in the repo), you can do git add .. Note that the wildcard operator is ., not *.

The opposite of add is rm, and keep in mind that it not only rms the file from git, but also from your computer.

This command only told git to look for changes in different files. We need to send the modifications to the server.

A brief aside: the.gitignore