Git Links and "Cheat Sheet"

All written work products for the projects in this course should be maintained on GitHub. Git seems to be the dominant open source distributed version control system, and GitHub offers free accounts and a good set of tutorials.

There are a few steps you will have to follow, but they are not difficult:

Each student will need to Create a GitHub account , which is free, fast and easy.
Each student will need to download, install, and configure the Git software. If you get tired of entering your password, you can generate and up-load an ssh key to GitHub.
One member of each team will need to create a repository for each project.
The simplest collaboration model is for the repository owner to add the other team members as collaborators in that repository. Once this has been done, all of the team members will be able to directly push updates back to the project repository.
But, if you are feeling frisky a little later in the semester, and want to see learn how the big kids do it, you can try managing your project repo with forks and pull requests.

You will probably want to do some background reading on git. At the very least you should read:

Pro Git chapters 1-1.3 ... Introduction to Git concepts
Pro Git chapters 2-2.3 ... Basic commands

Before too long you will probably also want to read:

Pro Git section 2.4 Discarding bad updates.
Pro Git section 2.5 Working with remote servers (clone and push operations).
Pro Git section 2.6 Creating and using tags.

And you can use Git in anger you will need to understand branches:

Pro Git Chapter 3 Branching.

Cheat Sheet

To get you started, these are the commands you will use most often:

git clone git@github.com:username/repository.git
Create a local copy of the specified repository (owned by the specified user).
By default it will be created in the current working directory with the same name it has on GitHub, but you can specify the name that the local directory should be given.
git status
List all of the differences (both un-tracked, and uncommitted) between the current workspace and the committed state of the repository from which it came.
git add file ...
Note that the specified files have been created or changed, and should be included in the next commit.
git diff file
Display a list of the differences between the specified file in the current workspace and the last committed version.
git rm file ...
Note that the specified files have are being deleted and should no longer be included in the repository.
git commit -m "comments" file
Commit all of the staged changes, and associate the specified comment with this commit.
Note that this change has only been made to the local repository, and has not yet been pushed back to GitHub.
git log file
Display the commit history for the specified file.
git tag -a tagname -m "description"
associate the specified tagname and description with the currently committed versions.
git pull
Go back to the repository from which this local copy was cloned, obtain all of the recent changes that have been made there, and merge those changes into the local copy.
If you want to get fancy (e.g. and review the changes before you try to merge them) you can do this in separate fetch and merge operations. Note, however, that as soon as you start having conflicting updates you are not in Kansas any more, and it is time to truly understand branching, merging, rebasing, and distributed work flows.
git push origin master
Take all of the changes that have been made in the local copy, and send them back to the master copy on GitHub. Note that this operation will fail if there are changes on the master copy that have not yet been merged into the local copy (this is a safety feature).