According to the GitHub website,
GitHub is a development platform inspired by the way you work. From open source to business, you can host and review code, manage projects, and build software alongside 40 million developers.
To join GitHub, sign up using with a username, email, and password at this link.
Once you have a GitHub account, you'll want to join our lab so that you can collaborate on projects with us! To do this, you'll need to be invited and added as a member of the organization.
Please provide Ari your GitHub username and he will coordinate an invitation. You can do this via Slack (@ari) or email ([email protected]).
With both Git and GitHub configured, you'll want to try your hand at using them! The best way to get started is to jump right in. Your first step should be interacting with the very repo that you're reading this guide on.
From your terminal, navigate to the directory you'd like to download the repo
to. For example, if you have a directory called Projects, you might run
cd ~/Projects
and within this directory, clone the resources repository via
git clone https://github.com/sokolhessnerlab/resources.git
This will download the most up-to-date version and associated branches to your
local machine. Once complete, run cd resources and you'll be in the root
directory of the repository!
It turns out that GitHub supports emojis automagically with it’s Markdown
conversion engine! This means that GitHub will convert text strings of the type :EMOJICODE:
to its avatar when inside files ending .md. A well-placed and contextually
appropriate emoji 💩 can really brighten up ☀️ an otherwise very technical document 😴.
For your first contribution to the resources repository, you're going to find
somewhere in this github.md article that you believe will benefit from an emoji. You
can see which emojis are availabe with their associated emoji codes with the
Emoji Cheat Sheet.
We'll go through this first contribution step-by-step. Before getting started here, please make sure you have read the entire Git article and be sure to have your GitHub profile added to the lab's organization.
Then, you must clone this repository so you can work on it from your local machine.
Inside your terminal application, navigate to the resources repository on your local machine. At the root of the
resources directory, run
git pull --rebase origin master
This will make sure your local version of the repository is up to date with the stable remote version of the repository. Since you are going to make a contribution for the first time, we will consider this experimental. 🐀 Therefore, we should create a new branch for your experiment.
Check which branches are currently indexed on the remote repository:
git branch -a
This will return a list of branches, both local and remote. The remote branches
will have the format remotes/origin/<branch-name>, where <branch-name>
might be HEAD, master, contributing, etc.
You want to create a new branch locally with a name that does not exist yet. You also want the branch name to precisely and concisely describe its purpose. For example, consider creating your branch in the following way:
git checkout -b tutorial/emojicode
This will checkout a new branch on your local machine with a branch-type identifier (i.e., tutorial)
and emoji to and the emojicode you intend to use for it. This is short and
sweet, and hopefully unique. 
(If not, there are still infinitely many text
strings you can use to name your branch with.)
You should now be in your brand new branch. Open the file github.md from
inside the guides directory (the file
you're reading this tutorial from). Find the
place in the text you were planning to add your emoji. Add the emoji code and
save the file.
Back to the command line, it's time to push your new emoji. You first need to add the file to the Git index, and afterward commit the changes made to the file(s) listed on the index. Do this by running
git add ./guides/github.md
git commit
In your commit message, try to be specific and follow the template's intended structure. This will make it easier to refer back to your modification later. With your commit ready, you now need to create a remote branch to push to via
git push -u origin <branch-name>
If this succeeds without error, it's time to take a look on the GitHub page itself. From here, navigate to your new branch, and see if the emoji appeared where and how you intended it. If so, fantastic! If not, try to debug on your local version of the branch. When you think it's fixed: add, commit, and push the update to the remote branch. Continue in this way until the emoji is exactly where and how you intended it to be in the document.
After your branch is ready to go, it's time to merge it into the master
branch. Please double check that the code on your branch is free of bugs before
merging.
Begin by checking out the master branch:
git checkout master
Then, while on the master branch, make sure your local branch is synced to the remote by running
git pull origin master
It's time to merge in your branch commits locally, using
git merge <branch-name>
Lastly, push these changes to the remote, by running
git push origin master
Coming soon...