Submitting (5 points)

In this course, we’re going to be using GitHub. GitHub uses Git which is a version control system used by programmers. We’re going to learn a lot more about Git later, but for now, let’s use its most basic functionality.

Go to GitHub and create an account, if you don’t already have one. Many of the courses in the computer science major will require using GitHub so you’ll be well-served by getting comfortable with it now.

Go to the GitHub Classroom assignment page and accept the assignment. Wait a few seconds and then reload the page and you should see “You’re ready to go!” Click the link for the assignment repository.

The repository it created should be at a URL like https://github.com/systems-programming/lab1-accountname. The last component of the URL will be some combination of the lab name and your GitHub user name. You will need this in the cloning step below.

Next, you need to clone the assignment repository which will download all of the files (if any) in the remote repository on GitHub to your computer. To do this, you’ll need to use gh to authenticate to GitHub and then perform the clone. gh is the command-line tool for working with GitHub. Most of the time, you will use plain Git commands, but for authentication and cloning repositories, you’ll use gh.

In a terminal, run the command

$ gh auth login

and then using the arrow keys, select GitHub.com and press enter. Select HTTPS for the preferred protocol and press enter. When it asks to authenticate Git with your GitHub credentials, type Y and press enter. When it asks how you’d like to authenticate, select Login with a web browser and press enter. Copy the one-time code it displays and then press enter to open the browser. If it cannot open the browser, you can click here.

In either case, paste the code you copied and login (which should only be required if you have logged out of GitHub). Click the Authorize github button on the web page. At this point, you should see something like

✓ Authentication complete.
- gh config set -h github.com git_protocol https
✓ Configured git protocol
✓ Logged in as accountname

in the terminal.

Now you’re ready to clone your repository. (In future labs, you shouldn’t need to authenticate again unless you log out.) Run

$ gh repo clone systems-programming/lab1-accountname

where lab1-accountname should match the URL for the repository described above.

At this point, you should have a directory named lab1-accountname (where, again, the actual name is specific to your repository). This is your newly-created local repository.

Copy all of the files and directories from lab1 into the newly-created local repository’s directory. Read the man page for cp to figure out how to recursively copy directories.

cd to your local repository directory. The contents of this directory (recursively) should look like this.

repo
├── books
│   ├── Joyce, James - Dubliners.txt
│   └── Stoker, Bram - Dracula.txt
├── task1.txt
└── task3.txt

We want to add the files to the repository, commit them, and then push them to GitHub. (We’ll talk about why there are separate steps later. You can think of these three operations as “inform Git about the current state of the files,” “have Git make a snapshot of the current state of the repository,” and “tell GitHub about the changes we made in the local repository.”

These are the commands you need to run.

$ git add books task1.txt task3.txt
$ git commit -m 'Submitting lab 1'
$ git push

Caution

If you make changes to a file, you need to run $ git add and pass it the path of the file you changed again. And then you’ll need to run $ git commit and finally $ git push.

The -m 'Submitting lab 1' causes Git to create a commit message with the contents Submitting lab 1. Normally, we’ll want to create more descriptive messages, but this is fine for now.

At this point, you’re done! You can check that everything worked correctly by going back to your repository on GitHub and checking that all of the files and directories show up. You should see two directories and two files:

  • .github
  • books
  • task1.txt
  • task3.txt

Info

The .github directory was added automatically by GitHub Classroom. So why didn’t it show up in your local repo? Because its name starts with a period! Recall that files whose names start with a period are hidden. You can see the hidden files using ls -a. If you do this, you’ll also see a .git directory too. .git is where Git stores its local configuration.

Finally, you can remove your lab1 directory that we started with now that you’ve copied everything over to your local repository for lab 1. Since lab1 isn’t empty, $ rmdir lab1 won’t work to remove it. And since it’s a directory, $ rm lab1 work work either! Go ahead and try both commands out.

Read the man page for rm to figure out how to remove directories recursively.

Following the instructions above regarding which files should appear in your repository and which must be removed is worth 5 points. Every subsequent lab also has 5 free points for following the submission directions.