Getting to grips with git and GitHub

Webinar Content (see slides here):

• Out git backgrounds

• Introduction

  • What is version control?
  • What is git?
  • What is the difference between git and GitHub?

• Working collaboratively with git and using git branches

• Slides on basic git commands with nice visualisations to explain concepts such as origin and remote/push and pull, branching, pull requests, etc.

• How do you use git? Where do you type git commands?

  • Using git in the command line
  • Using git in Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) eg. RStudio, VSCode, GitHub Desktop

• GitHub features

  • pull requests
  • issues and projects
  • actions
  • pages

• git security

• git hooks and precommit yaml

• links to useful resources

Repository setup

The current repository has the following structure (designed around building a Quarto based introduction to git presentation)

📦tdl-academy-git-intro
 ┣ 📂images # required images like logos
 ┣ 📜.gitignore # what git should ignore
 ┣ 📜.pre-commit-config.yaml # pre-commit setup
 ┣ 📜introduction_to_git.qmd # quarto presentation
 ┣ 📜LICENSE # open-source license
 ┣ 📜presentation_styles.css # style additions to quarto presentation
 ┗ 📜README.md # <- you are here

git command glossary

Here are a few useful git commands and what they do:

Command	Definition
git status	Check current status of local repository - is it up to date?
git pull	Pull changes from GitHub to local repository
git add [FileName]	Stage file for committing
git commit -m [message]	Commit staged changes to GitHub. Always add meaningful message.
git push	Push committed changes to GitHub
git fetch	Get latest version references for repository
git stash	Stash changes so that I can send to different branch ( I use when I forgot to switch branches before making change. Run this command - then switch to branch - then run command below)
git stash pop	Unstash changes that were previously stashed (Used in combination with command above to move changes onto different branch)
git branch	List existing branches
git branch [branchName]	Create new branch
git push --set-upstream origin [branchName]	Push a branch online
git branch -d [branchName]	Delete branch
git checkout [branchName]	Switch to branch
git checkout -t origin/[branchName]	Switch to remote branch (note you'll need to run git fetch first)
git merge [branchName]	Merge changes from one branch to another
git rm [fileName]	Remove file and record
git mv [fileName]	Move file and version history within repository
git reset	Remove any staged/added files
git diff [fileName]	Check for any changes in a file compared to when the file last had a commit associated with it
git add --patch	Select a particular change within a file to stage/add and commit
git --help	Get help on any git command
git grep [pattern]	Search inside all files in repository for pattern

Quarto installation

Quarto is an open-source report/presentation building tool that can be used across a range of programming languages. It is based on Rmarkdown - a reporting tool for the R programming language. The introduction to git presentation is built using the introduction_to_git.qmd file producing the introduction_to_git.html. To edit and build the html based output presentation, you'll need to install Quarto and use a tool like RStudio or Visual Studio Code.

pre-commit installation

The current repository uses a pre-commit workflow to run some simple checks and formatting steps on any changes you are committing before pushing them to your remote (online) repository on GitHub. If you'd like to using the pre-commit workflow while editing this codebase you can install it by following these steps:

To install the pre-commit workflow, follow these steps:

1. Install the python programming language
2. Install pre-commit with: pip install pre-commit in the command line
3. Navigate to your repository on your computer in the command line and run pre-commit install

Some useful resources

• Introduction to GitHub
• GitHub documentation pages
• A game to help us think about git branches
• See this git in the command line tutorial
• Check out the git handbook
• git glossary of commands to remember
• Check out git flow for collaboration