WEST-041023-LIVE

How to use this repository

Day 1 Instructions

NOTE: Coding along to live lecture is NOT required. It can actually make following the lecture harder so we typically do not recommend it. The follow is for those who wish to code along or who wish to code along while watching the video after lecture. Please hold all questions about errors or issues you have in your code until break or after lecture.

Fork this repository

• Click on the Fork Icon at the top of the UI and wait for the forking operation to complete
• I needed to select my username here to indicate I want to fork to my account because I'm part of multiple organizations

Clone your fork of the repository to your local machine

To do this there two main tasks we'll want to complete.

1. Get the SSH link for your fork of the repository
2. Clone the repository to a folder on your local machine

1. Getting the SSH link to clone the repository

• Once the fork is complete, click on the green code button
• in the sub menu that appears, make sure that SSH is underlined
• click the clipboard button to copy the ssh link to your clipboard

2. Cloning the forked repository to a folder on your local machine

• open up a terminal and navigate to the directory where you want to store your lecture code
  • In my case I'm creating the folder through the terminal using the mkdir lecture-code command
  • next, cd lecture-code to move my terminal's working directory into the lecture-code folder
• run git clone <pasteyoursshgitrepolinkhere> in the terminal
• run code west-041023-live to open the repository within VSCode

PRO TIP If you type the tab key on your keyboard while interacting with the terminal, you can autocomplete long file or folder names. In this case, I typed code west and then hit the tab key and it expanded the path to the only folder name matching west which was west-041023-live. So, you only need to type as many characters as can uniquely identify the file or folder name that you want to open and then you can use tab to complete the rest of the required typing without typos!

Now that you have the repository cloned to your local machine, you'll be able to following along with lecture inside of your own code editor if you wish.

  git remote add learn git@github.com:rothberry/west-041023-live.git

Before Every Subsequent Lecture

1. Click on the Fetch & Merge button on your fork of the repository on GitHub.
2. Run git pull learn main from within the attached terminal of your local copy of the repository in VS Code.

Recommended VS Code Extension for Git

GitLens! See the GIF below for an example of how to install a VSCode extension.

The GitLens extension allows you an integrated Visual interface for viewing past commits, stashes and even file history over time. It adds options directly into the built in Version Control pane of the VSCode editor.

Merge Conflicts

If all goes well, you should not encounter merge conflicts when you follow this workflow as part of participation in lecture. There is one scenario where they might come up, so I want to describe it here and how to address it.

Scenario

Say these events happen in this order:

1. You go through the steps above and pull down the updated code to your machine.
2. You start taking some notes there and attempting to solve problems in the starter code.
3. The lecturer notices something in the lecture code that they want to change and pushes another commit to the lecture repo.

In this case, going through the fetch & merge and git pull workflow may result in what's called a merge conflict. The safest thing to do in this situation is to run git stash locally to hide your changes in your local repository so that the pull from GitHub goes off without a hitch. You can still view the code within your stash within VSCode and you can even return it to your machine with git stash pop if you like.

If this scenario arises, your lecturer will generally communicate the change in advance, so this scenario should be rare. But, should it happen, this is one approach you can take to get around any potential problems.

If you have code stashed in your local repository, it won't be visible within the regular file structure (AKA your working directory). If you want to return the code to your machine, you can still do so by applying the stash.

If you prefer, you can simply keep your code in the stash and it'll allow you to more clearly see the difference between your code and the starter code when you click on a stashed change within the Version Control Tab's Stashes dropdown. It will show you a visual diff with your additions highlighted in green and your removals highlighted in red.