The goal of the tutorial is to provide the necessary minimum information for successful code submissions. You can either submit your code via Github web user interface or commit your changes. If you are familiar with working with git, feel free to skip this tutorial.
For any problems and further assistance, please contact our TAs.
We have created an organization called STAT-31015-Winter-2021 for this class. To get access to the organizations you are in, click the upper right corner of the Github webpage and click "Your organizations",
Find our class STAT-31015-Winter-2021,
By clicking through the name, now you will be directed to the organization page,
Here you will find a repository (repo) with your first name. All the homework code should be submitted into this repo. If you don't find any repositories or the name doens't match, please contact us. Here we provide two ways to submit your code. If you are not familiar with git, we recommend you to use the web user interface. But feel free to try out more git features!
Now you can click and enter your repo. I will use my repo as an example. Initially the repo will look like the following:
First please create a folder named "HW#" where "#" is the number of homework. Creating a folder through webpage is a little bit tricky. Please follow the instructions in this page to create an empty folder. For example, in my repo I have created a folder named "HW4" for homework 4. Enter this folder. To upload your code, simply click the "Add file" button and select "Upload files". Follow the instrutions to select your files and finally click "commit changes". Now you can check on your repo to make sure the files have been successfully uploaded.
That's all! Feel free to stop here. If you are interested in more about git, please go ahead.
This tutorial was adapted from these notes by Richard Zhu ([email protected]).
git is a version-control system. It lets you track the whole history of changes made to code stored within a repo (repository), and it's especially powerful when collaborating on the same codebase with many people. It is designed to enable the following:
- periodic saving of work (called committing)
- returning to old versions when a problem is introduced
- creation of experimental code branches with out disturbing the main or working code
- merging the concurrent work of independent developers
- remote backup and storage of work
- tracking a log of project history
A git repo is stored locally on your computer. To make it visible to others online, it needs to be mirrored to somewhere in the cloud - and that's where GitHub comes in. GitHub (and competitors like Bitbucket, Gitlab) allow you to host git repositories on their remote servers, and serves as a pretty frontend to interact with your repositories.
Per the initial assumption, we assume you are using Mac or Linux, where git usually comes installed. Test this out by opening a terminal and typing git version. If it spits out git version 2.XX.X, then you have it installed. You can also find installation instructions for Windows users here.
If it gives you an error message, then you should follow the instructions here to install git.
Required: Check that git version gives you the desired result.
After installing git, you need to supply your name and email to identify with your changes:
git config --global user.name "Your name"
git config --global user.email [email protected]To interface with remote repositories stored on GitHub, you will also need to make a GitHub account. If you don't already have a GitHub account, make one.
Required: In order to pull and push to private repos on GitHub, you will need to provide some form of authentication. The ideal solution here is to use SSH keys. Follow the instructions here to generate a new SSH key for your computer and add it to your GitHub account.
Go to your repo under STAT-31015-Winter-2021 organization, copy over the assignment files, click the "code" dropdown menu, and click Clone > SSH. You can click the clipboard button to copy the repo's ssh URL to your clipboard
Check: [email protected]:STAT-31015-Winter-2021/Yian.git will copy over the entire contents of the repo to a directory in whichever directory you call it in.
After you clone the repository, you can make changes locally. Now you can create new folders under the local repository and drag your code into the correspnding folders. After you've made changes to the files and are satisfied with your work, run git status. It should output a list of tracked files that you modified, but haven't yet been committed, like so:
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git restore <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified: file_that_i_changed.m
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")If you don't commit changes and push them to GitHub, we won't be able to see them. To ensure that Git tracks your changes, make sure to add the files to staging like so: git add file_that_i_changed.m, repeating this for each file. Or you can use git add . to add all the changed files. If you run git status after doing this, you should see:
On branch master
Your branch is up to date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git restore --staged <file>..." to unstage)
modified: file_that_i_changed.mStaging is a step prior to committing. It allows you to iteratively add changes you think should go into a commit. Once you're satisfied with your changes, you can make a commit and add a descriptive message like so: git commit -m "add tests to file_that_i_changed.m". This will show you the commit you just made, with statistics on how many lines of code you added/deleted and how many files you modified:
[master f9fd5ba] add tests
1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)If you run git status now, you should see
On branch master
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 1 commit.
(use "git push" to publish your local commits)This means that the tree of work your local git is tracking is one node (commit) further ahead than the remote tree. In order to update the remote tree and submit your changes, simply run git push.
That's it!
Optional: When doing your assignments, try to make your commits as atomic as possible instead of making one big commit with all your changes. That is, if you complete all the problems within file.m, git add and git commit -m "solved problems in file.m". Repeat this for each file's changes. Making your changes as atomic as possible and writing descriptive commit messages is good practice, because it means you have a very clean work tree. Any colleagues reading the history can easily revert changes you made, and it minimizes the chance of big conflicts with other people's work you have to resolve manually.
- Git homepage: http://git-scm.com/
- Git documentation: http://git-scm.com/doc
- Git Book: http://git-scm.com/book/en/v2