imclab / git-it

A workshopper module for learning Git and GitHub - Social coding, y'all.

Git-it

A workshopper module for learning Git and GitHub - Social coding, y'all. These modules run a little app in your terminal and users work their way through the challenges. See nodeschool.io for more.

For developer documentation, see dev-doc.md.

Hello, future Forkers, Branchers and Pull Requesters!

This app runs in your Terminal (Mac) or Bash (Windows) and has challenges for learning Git and GitHub. It uses the real terminal (so you'll be learning the awesome command line), it uses real Git and GitHub which means when you finish all of the challenges you'll have real repositories on your GitHub account and green squares on your contribution chart.

What you'll need to run this:

A few development essentials, all are free and/or free and open source.

• Git, this is your tracker of changes! If you're on Windows, download the free GitHub for Windows, which includes Git, and use the Git Shell for your terminal. If you're on a Mac you can download GitHub for Mac (from Preferences, install the command line tool) or standalone Git.
• Node.js, this is what this app is written in so you'll need this to run it. It's an engine for running JavaScript on servers (your computer is a server!) and will live quietly in the background. You can download it here (For most, you can just pick the Windows .msi or Mac .pkg option).
• Editor, if you don't have one already, you'll need a text editor for editing code. A few options: Sublime Text, Textmate, Brackets.

Install Git-it

Once you have the essentials above, install Git-it.

• Open up a terminal window and install Git-it globally on your computer (so that you can run it from anywhere). NPM delievers Node.js modules (that's what this app is) to your computer from the command line, real easy like (it is included when you install Node.js):

$ npm install -g git-it

• Once it's done installing components, you can run it:
• If you run into trouble with this command it may be due to permissions on your computer, try adding 'sudo': sudo npm install -g git-it

$ git-it

• This should load the menu. You're ready to go!

How it Works

• Use the arrows to select the first challenge and press 'Enter'.
• Read the challenge text, do as it says and when you're done type git-it verify to see if you've compelted the challenge correctly.
• If the challenge components were not completed correctly, Git-it returns some text to help you know what went wrong.
• For some challenges you'll need to open new terminal windows and then run Git-it inside the window you've just opened. Git-it can run from any (or mutiple) terminal windows and always saves your completed status. You'll need to run it from where you're doing your Git work, so it's OK to move around like that.
• Scroll up! When the challenge loads, it scrolls to the bottom. Scroll up to the top of the challenge to not miss steps.

If you have any questions about something, just create a new issue.

Tips

Code snippets often times look like $ some code-stuff --here. The dollar sign identifies the line as one a user would enter into the the command line, but you don't actually include it when you type it into terminal. In this case, you'd actually just type some code-stuff --here.

Variables are indicated by <VARIABLENAME> in code snippets. When you actually use the line of code, replace it, including the <>, with your variable. For instance to make a new folder in terminal the format is, mkdir <FOLDERNAME>, so if you wanted to make a folder named 'octocat', you'd type: mkdir octocat.

Command line, terminal, bash all basically mean the same thing: the MS-DOS, Doogie Howser looking screen full of words and numbers. It's awesomely powerful. You can do a lot of things from your terminal like delete, rename, copy or create files and folders; run scripts and send things back and forth between servers (like the ones storing things on GitHub.com) and your computer (also a server!).

Topics Covered in Git-it

• Basic command line such as: cd, mkdir
• Creating a local repository
• Checking status, adding and committing changes
• Creating remote repositories on GitHub.com
• Forking repositories
• Connecting local repositories to remote ones on GitHub.com
• Pushing and pulling to sync changes to GitHub.com
• Creating branches for features/changes
• Adding and working with a collaborator (Hi, @reporobot!)
• Creating a pull request
• Merging and deleting branches