Collaborating

Overview

Teaching: 25 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

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

Objectives

• Clone a remote repository.

• Collaborate pushing to a common repository.

• Describe the basic collaborative workflow.

To mimic collaborating with other people, please open a second terminal window. This window will represent your collaborator, working on another computer.

The ‘Collaborator’ needs to download a copy of the Owner’s repository to her machine. This is called “cloning a repo”. To clone the Owner’s repo, enter the following into the second terminal window:

$ git clone https://github.com/vlad/planets.git ~/Desktop/vlad-planets

Replace ‘vlad’ with the yout username.

You can now make changes to this completely separate version of the repository to model another collaborator working on it. So just as you’ve done before:

$ cd ~/Desktop/vlad-planets
$ nano pluto.txt
$ cat pluto.txt

It is so a planet!

$ git add pluto.txt
$ git commit -m "Add notes about Pluto"

 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 pluto.txt

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

$ git push origin master

Counting objects: 4, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
Writing objects: 100% (3/3), 306 bytes, done.
Total 3 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
To https://github.com/vlad/planets.git
   9272da5..29aba7c  master -> master

Note that we didn’t have to create a remote called origin: Git has already setup this as default from the original clone that we did.

Take a look at thes repository on the GitLab website now (maybe you need to refresh your browser.) You should be able to see the new commit made by the ‘Collaborator’ (though in this case it’s still you!).

To download the changes from GitLab, switch back to your original terminal and enter::

$ git pull origin master

remote: Counting objects: 4, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2/2), done.
remote: Total 3 (delta 0), reused 3 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (3/3), done.
From https://github.com/vlad/planets
 * branch            master     -> FETCH_HEAD
Updating 9272da5..29aba7c
Fast-forward
 pluto.txt | 1 +
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
 create mode 100644 pluto.txt

Now the three repositories (Owner’s local, Collaborator’s local, and Owner’s on GitLab) are back in sync.

A Basic 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 master,
• 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 master

It is better to make many commits with smaller changes rather than of one commit with massive changes: small commits are easier to read and review.

Comment Changes in GitLab

The Collaborator has some questions about one line change made by the Owner and has some suggestions to propose.

With GitLab, it is possible to comment the diff of a commit. Over the line of code to comment, a blue comment icon appears to open a comment window.

The Collaborator posts its comments and suggestions using GitLab interface.

Version History, Backup, and Version Control

Some backup software can keep a history of the versions of your files. They also allows you to recover specific versions. How is this functionality different from version control? What are some of the benefits of using version control, Git and GitLab?

Key Points

• git clone copies a remote repository to create a local repository with a remote called origin automatically set up.