Purpose: Become familiar with Git commands in the GitHub Desktop
Task: Clone a repository, modify a file, add and push changes
Outcome: Understanding how to use git to get files and publish changes
You can use the GitHub Desktop client to pull and push changes (among many other features). Once you have it, sign in and clone this repository.
Once downloaded, follow the onscreen instructions to setup the client. One option that you'll want to change is the default editor. Go to File > Options to make changes. (psst. I recommend VSCode)
In GitHub Desktop, go File > Clone Repository. Then use the filter to find "AERO Tutorial". Then press Clone. Now click on Show in Explorer to open up the containing folder.
Now that you have this folder downloaded, it's just a folder on your computer. You can do pretty much anything you want to it. So, let's change a file. In the explorer (in the repo you just download) go to data folder. Open the favorite-animal.txt file and add your favorite animal at the end of the file. Save your changes.
Go back to GitHub Desktop. In the AERO Tutorial repo, you should see that one file change. It should show the changes if you click on that file. To commit the changes, select which files to commit (should only have the one right now) and type a commit message.
The commit message is in the bottom left. It will have a default message for you. Click in the first box and type a brief message. Commit message are an art. They should be descriptive and short. For this, type adding another animal. The 'Description' area is for longer messages. Dont' worry about that yet.
Now press Commit to main.
Good, now the changes are saved, but they are not available to everyone else. To solve that, look at the top bar, there should be an option to "Push Origin". Do that. If everything went well, you should have a screen that says "No Local Changes". (FYI: local means 'on your machine' whereas remote is what's published everywhere else)
Merge conflicts are what happens when two of the same files were committed to the branch with conflicting information.
For example, let's say John and Sarah are working on favorite-animals.txt at the same time and John changes line 4 to say "Dog" while Sarah changes line 4 to say "Cat". Both can commit the file in the way you just did. If Sarah tries to push the changes, they can. Now when John tries to push the changes, their local repository is actually old and the push won't work since John's change to the file would conflict with Sarah's.
If this happens to you, GitHub Desktop will prompt you to open the conflict in VSCode (or another default editor). Go to that editor to accept or decline the changes. See VSCode Tutorial for a section on dealing with Merge conflicts. These can get very confusing even for long time Git users. So, if you get stuck at this step, don't fret! Reach out for help.
GitHub only shows the remote version of the repo. So, if you want to check if your changes actually pushed or not, you can go to the AERO Tutorial GitHub repository and check what that version says. If it's different than you expect, double check you "push orgin" after commiting.