Map Makers: Update files of an existing map
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Unless you know you have write access to the map, fork the map in Github
- Find the map repo, for example: http://github.com/triplea-maps/world_at_war
- Click the "fork" button
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Next we're going to download a copy of the repository (or the fork, whichever we are using) by "cloning" it
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Once the "clone" is done, on our local file system we'll have all the files we see in repo
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Very importantly the clone goes into a single folder on your file system. Everything below this folder can be staged and uploaded to the repository. So if for example, you want to add images, you would drop them into this folder.
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Once we are done doing updates, we then use git to find the files that have been changed, and we tell git to upload them, supplying a "change message" along with the files so others can see our message when they see the repository has changed.
Clone a map git repository, as an example we'll clone the MapMaking repository
- first determine the URL of the repository. To do this head to the gibhub.com page with the repository you want to clone, for example: https://github.com/triplea-maps/MapMaking
- Locate the clone URL and copy it to your clipboard. The clone URL is indicated in github, on each map repository page. Double check you have an SSH option and found a URL that begins with "git@".
- head back to your local file system, locate your home folder and create a folder called "work" (or any other name that suits you, this folder will contain map repository clones)
- open up the folder, right click and select "Git GUI from here"
- select "clone existing repository"
- Paste the clone URL into the "Source Location Field", and type in a name for the Destination folder that will be created. Typically the folder will match the repository name, but it does not have to.
- The clone operation will happen, the contents of the repository will have been downloaded and placed into the destination folder specified above, and last, you'll see the git gui staging window.
Find the folder you cloned into earlier (from the above steps), it should contain a clean copy of every file that is in the repository. Go ahead and dive into it and modify and add files. When you are done proceed to the next step.
Find the folder you cloned into earlier, right click it and select the open up git gui menu option
- click the "rescan" button to have git look for changes
- select changed file in the top left and click "stage" to get the changes selected for the next commit
- add a commit message describing roughly what was changed and in a few words why
- click the "push" button to push the changes to the remote repository on github. After you've done this you should see the new commit on the github repository page that you pushed to.