To start, download the exercise content for today.
Once you have done that, use the command line to navigate into the folder and follow the steps from last class to initialize a git repository. As you move through todays lab (and especially once you have completed it), make sure to commit your changes.
Open the lab.js file, and attempt as many problems as you can.
The goal is to get through all of the starting questions, and then as many of the intermediate and advanced questions as possible. If you get through the intermediate questions, challenge yourself with the advanced questions. The advanced questions will cover topics not taught in class. This is intentional. Use resources online to help you figure out the solutions.
Do not move on to the next section until you have completed the starting and intermediate questions.
Git is great and all, but your files still just exist on your computer which is nice… as long as your computer works. Enter GitHub!
GitHub is a company that gives developers a place to upload their code, showcase projects in a portfolio, and enable collaboration between developers by taking advantage of Git to sync code between different machines. You don’t need to have a GitHub account to use Git but a GitHub account will allow you to make your code and yourself more visible in the software engineering community.
Every time you start a new software project, you should upload it to GitHub. Let’s start by uploading your code from this exercise. To get started, log into GitHub and click the green New button to create a new GitHub repository (see the screenshot below). You’ll want to create a new GitHub repository for every Git repository you want to upload.
Here’s how to fill out the form:
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Under Repository Name, enter making-decisions (or whatever you’d like call it, but note this affects the URL)
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The description is optional
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Leave it set to Public — we want your future employers to be able to check out your code
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Leave Initialize this repository with a README unchecked — you’ve already initialized the repository on your local machine with git init
Click Create Repository to create a repository with the above settings. You’ve just created a remote repository (“remote repo” for short or just “remote”). It’s a remote repository (think like a remote island) because it exists far away from your computer. The repository on your computer is a local repository (or “local repo”).
Now you’ll need to connect your remote repository to your local repository. To do this, you’ll need the address of the remote repo. From your remote repository’s homepage, locate the Quick Setup box and copy the HTTPS URL of your remote repo:
With your remote’s address in hand, head over to your terminal — next, you’ll tell your local repo that it should track your GitHub repo with the Git command, git remote add.
Make sure you’re in the right place
- Make sure you’re in the directory of your Git repo before you execute any of the Git commands below.
git remote add takes in two arguments:
The name you want to use to refer to your remote
The name can be anything you want but origin is the name everyone uses by default
This allows you to connect your local repo with multiple remote repos
The remote’s address
Putting all of the above together, here’s the command to connect your GitHub repo and local repo together:
$ git remote add origin REPLACE_THIS_WITH_YOUR_URL
When we add a remote, much like when we do any other configuration, it only exists for that repository. Outside of the folder our repository is in, none of these settings exist.
Now we have a remote — this is like a portal that goes to whatever URL we point at. So, now that we’ve established a portal link, what do we do with it? Same thing you’d probably do if you actually opened a portal to the server room at GitHub. Push things through it and see what happens.
$ git push REPLACE_WITH_REMOTE_NAME main
Replace [remote name] (no square brackets) with the name you used when you added the remote (it’s probably origin). You might wonder about what main is — that’s the name of the branch. For now, we’ll just have one branch, so we’ll always type main there. In the Further Study section, there’s some information about branching.
Once you’ve git push-ed, Git will ask you for a username. This is your GitHub username. Then it will ask for your password. (When you type a password, you may be used to seeing asterisks (*) appear; in this case, nothing will. Don’t worry! It’s still working. This is just another way of hiding your password.)
After this, head over to your GitHub profile. You should see that your new repo has been created, and that any files you’ve added have been pushed to the server. Pushing code to GitHub is the simplest way to back up your work to the cloud, share code between teams, and make sure you remember what you did and when you did it (complete with notes to yourself!).