Activate your KTH GitHub account
At KTH, we have an enterprise edition of GitHub running locally. As a student, you get a free account to use for university work, projects and so on. This is pretty much the same as regular GitHub, except private to KTH users. Several courses make use of version control (Git) and project management tools (GitHub), so it is good to have it setup from the beginning.
Go to KTH GitHub and login to activate your account. Our automation cannot find you until you’ve logged in a first time, so log in as soon as possible.
Setup SSH Keys
SSH can let you connect and authenticate your computer with remote services, without needing to provide a username and password every time you access them.
N.b. this step can be problematic, so pay attention to the commands you are typing (measure twice, cut once!)
N.b. make sure you are in KTH Github - https://gits-15.sys.kth.se/ and not Public Github - https://www.github.com
The process is visualized in the following video:
Choose a Text Editor
When you interact with git, you will most likely use the command line
(e.g. Bash) to issue commands. Some of these commands will launch a text
editor so you can type messages (e.g. a description of a change you have
made to a project). You can choose any text editor you like. (Hopefully, you’ve
already made up your mind.) We will use Atom in the example below.
By default git will use the vi (or vim) text editor, which can be
confusing if you haven’t run through the vimtutor tutorial
already. You can associate other text editors with
Git, so that it uses your editor of choice.
Working with Git
We’ll now go through how to work with Git. First we give two videos. Then we summarize, and briefly expand on some parts, in the text below.
Repos
You can create as many repos on KTH Github as you like, and they can be public or private. The best way to think of a repo is a place for all the resources of a project to be stored and managed. As the project resources change over time, new versions will be created. All of the resources (and their previous versions) can be accessed through the repo.
In this course, we will create a repo to use for assessment for you automatically. This is because we need particular settings to allow our grading bot to automatically check that you’ve completed the assignment. A while after you’ve logged into KTH GitHub for the first time, our bot will have created a repo for you. You can find it in the course organization datintro21.
Clone your repo and add a file
Now go back to your repo’s main page (click the “Code” tab farthest to the left) and copy the clone URL. You should copy the SSH URL, it should look something like this:
Or like this:
Clone your repository with the URL you copied, e.g.:
$ git clone git@gits-15.sys.kth.se:datintro20/datintro20-dbosk.git
[some output]
Now, that should’ve produced a new subdirectory in your current working directory.
$ ls
datintro20-dbosk
Go into the directory and create a file.
$ cd datintro20-dbosk
$ echo some text > myfile.md
To add the file to the repo, you must add it and then commit it.
$ git add myfile.md
$ git commit
Now the file is added to the local copy of the repository. To make this change available in the remote repository, we must push the changes.
$ git push
Assessment
To complete this assignment, you must show that you know how to interact with
the repo through Git: Add new files to your repo and change the README.md
file. The changes (and new files) must be committed and pushed to the repo. It
is important that you complete these steps using the command line interface.
You’ll find your assessment repository in the datintro20
organization (replace 20 with the year your start the course).
In this repo, you’ll find the rest of the assignment instruction.
By doing this assignment we assess that you can handle submissions of (program) code with version control tools.