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Git and GitHub for Open-Source Collaboration

Git basics:

Installing

install git and tig binaries:

sudo apt-get install git tig

Basic usage - for projects you own

mkdir myrepo ; cd myrepo ; git init

echo 'main(){}' >> mainfn.c

(Oh wait, we want to eventually sync this repo with one by the same name on GitHub making it public!) Go to GitHub, create an account if you haven't already. Create a repo on GitHub, we'll assume the URL is something like: http://github.com/<yourUserName>/myrepo

Among the steps to be taken to save our first work, git's commit subcommand in particular demands we have a GitHub user name and e-mail set up. So set those up, either local to this repo folder (in ./.git/config) or using --global to effectively edit the config file for all repos you'll create on your machine (in ~/.gitconfig):

git config [--global] user.name <yourUserName>
git config [--global] user.email <yourGitHubAssociatedEMAIL>

With the above done in your repo, you can commit the first changes:

git status # -> tell about unstaged changes
git add .  # -> stage everything from '.' recursively
git commit -m "first commit - main function added"
tig  #__ shows first commit

Now that the local commit is made, you can make a connection to GitHub and mirror your changes there via:

git remote add origin [email protected]:yourUserName/myrepo.git
git push -u origin master

Setup for projects on which you don't have GitHub push access

You can add your own fork of another project on GitHub, say iRODS, and after cloning your fork locally on your machine for development / debugging purposes, add the aforementioned upstream repo to your git config for pull requests.

(That is, you'll make changes to your own fork of the project and those can be synced with upstream using git pull --rebase, and then formalized into a pull request to the maintainer(s) of the upstream repo.)

The configuration changes for your local repo directory can be made using instructions from here:

Configuring a remote for a fork

Note also:

  • feature branches are cheap to create and can simplify the process of merging with the work of other collaborators (oh-oh, faux pas - we like to rebase here as a rule, rather than doing raw merges! :) )

  • git rebase -i can (should, if the trail of commits is too long or "a different story needs to be told") be used to squash a number of changes along a branch before rebasing or cherry-picking your work onto master or some other main branch.