Typical Workflow#
Learning Objectives#
Learn the steps to commit changes locally and push them to a remote repository
Understand how to create new branches and switch between them
Learn to tag commits and push tags to the remote repository
Practice merging changes from one branch into another
Learn to pull updates from a remote repository into the local repository
Understand how to review the repository history and tidy up branches
We should now all be set up to work between our local system and our remote repository on GitHub.
We will cover getting local changes onto the remote, getting remote changes onto our local repository, creating branches and tags, and finally see a simple merge.
This is intended as a demonstration of git. These commands will be explained and explored more in-depth in the remainder of the course, so don’t worry about the details of the steps we are taking. Feel free to write down any questions that arise and we shall make sure they are answered when taking the deeper dive.
Commit changes to the README#
On our local system, use a text editor to add your name to the README.md file.
Open VS Code, and use the File > Open Folder… dialogue to open our working directory. On most systems you should be able to do this directly from the terminal with the command
code .
Open README.md and make changes to the file, adding your name to the bottom, and save the file.
We can check the differences with the command
git status
To stage the changes to be committed, use the command
git add README.md
Check the status again:
git status
Then commit the change to the local repository
git commit --message "Add author to README"
We can now see the new commit, along with the original commit:
git log
We can tag this commit with the title v1 with
git tag v1
Push the commit and the tag#
Looking at the status again,
git status
we can see that we have made changes that are not yet on GitHub.
To get the most recent commit on the main branch to the remote origin, use
git push origin main
Opening the GitHub page with our browser, we can see the new commit.
Add a file to a new branch called “feature”#
Branches allow us to make changes to the repository whilst leaving the main version of the code untouched.
We can create a new branch in our repository that we shall name feature:
git branch feature
We can see the new branch with the command git branch:
$ git branch
feature
* main
We are still working on the main branch, indicated by the asterisk.
To change to the new branch, use
$ git switch feature
Switched to branch 'feature'
We now want to use the editor to create a new file.
Create a new file story.md with a title, save it.
Then use git add and git commit to add the file to the repository.
# Edit a new file story.md in VS code and save
git add story.md
git commit --message "New file story.md"
We can see the extra commit with
git log
We can upload this new branch to GitHub with
git push --set-upstream origin feature
then both branches will be visible in GitHub.
We are now at a stage that we have enough to proceed with the next lesson. The remainder of this tutorial is optional, but the commands demonstrate some more actions we will be learning about in the rest of this course.
Make a change to README through GitHub#
We can also make changes to files directly in GitHub.
This is typically reserved for small changes to documentation files.
To see this in action, navigate to README.md in the browser, and click the edit button which looks like a pencil (✏️).
Add the date to the line with your name, then go through the “Save Changes” dialogue, adding an appropriate commit message.
Once this is done, we need to pull the change from GitHub onto our local repository.
git pull origin main
Merge the branch “feature” into “main”#
In the final step of this demo, we’re going to integrate the work we did on the local branch with the change we just got from GitHub.
Assuming we are happy with the addition we made in our feature branch, we can now merge the two branches.
This will result in our code having both changes.
In the terminal we switch back to the main branch:
git switch main
To apply the changes we made in the feature branch, make a new merge commit:
git merge feature --message "Merge feature into main"
Reviewing the repository and tidying up#
Looking in the editor we should now see both the file story.md along with the updated file README.md.
All the changes we’ve made are visible through the log:
git log
To see a more concise log, use
git log --oneline --all --graph
We can tidy up our repository and safely delete the feature branch.
git branch --delete feature
Summary#
This concludes our tutorial. We have worked with both local and remote (GitHub) copies of our code, moving local changes to GitHub and vice-versa. We’ve also see some basic tagging, branching and a merge.
In the remainder of this course we will take a more in-depth look at the commands used above. This will give us a greater understanding of what we have done, as well as seeing the different options we can make use of when working collaboratively on larger projects.