Collaborating

Objectives

• Clone a remote repository.
• Collaborate by pushing to a common repository.
• Describe the basic collaborative workflow.

Questions

• How can I use version control to collaborate with other people?

Exercise

• We will work in pairs. One person will be the “Owner” and the other will be the “Collaborator”. The goal is that the Collaborator add changes into the Owner’s repository. We will switch roles at the end, so both persons will play Owner and Collaborator.

• If you’re working through this lesson on your own, you can carry on by opening a second terminal window.

The Owner needs to give the Collaborator access. In your repository page on GitHub, click the “Settings” button on the right, select “Collaborators”, click “Add people”, and then enter your partner’s username.

To accept access to the Owner’s repo, the Collaborator needs to go to https://github.com/notifications or check for email notification.

• The Collaborator needs to download a copy of the Owner’s repository to her machine. This is called “cloning a repo”.

$ git clone git@github.com:alflin/recipes.git ~/Desktop/alflin-recipes

Now it looks like this

As a collaborator, make a change in the repository and commit it. For example, you could add a recipe for hummus in a new file.

# Hummus
## Ingredients
* chickpeas
* lemon
* olive oil
* salt

$ git add hummus.md
$ git commit -m "Add ingredients for hummus"

Then push the change to the Owner’s repository on GitHub:

$ git push origin main

Remotes

A remote is a copy of the repository that is hosted somewhere else, that we can push to and pull from. On large projects you might have your own copy in your GitHub account (probably origin) and also the main “upstream” project repository. You would pull from upstream from time to time to get the latest updates that other people have committed.

• git remote -v lists all the remotes that are configured (we already used this in the last episode)
• git remote add [name] [url] is used to add a new remote
• git remote remove [name] removes a remote. Note that it doesn’t affect the remote repository at all - it just removes the link to it from the local repo.
• git remote set-url [name] [newurl] changes the URL that is associated with the remote. This is useful if it has moved.
• git remote rename [oldname] [newname] changes the local alias by which a remote is known - its name.

Pulling

To download the Collaborator’s changes from GitHub, the Owner now enters:

$ git pull origin main

Fetching

On the command line, the Collaborator can use git fetch origin main to get the remote changes into the local repository, but without merging them. Then by running git diff main origin/main the Collaborator will see the changes output in the terminal.

Collaborative workflow

In practice, it is good to be sure that you have an updated version of the repository you are collaborating on, so you should git pull before making our changes. The basic collaborative workflow would be:

• update your local repo with git pull origin main,
• make your changes and stage them with git add,
• commit your changes with git commit -m, and
• upload the changes to GitHub with git push origin main

Continue with

09. Branching and Merging