Summary and Setup

This lesson is designed to support hands-on exercises on collaborative work using Git and GitLab. The exercises are best done in pairs or in small groups.

This lesson is built with The Carpentries Workbench.

GitLab account

For these exercises, you can use the CERN GitLab instance (available to CERN users, with the user name as your CERN login name), or an account on GitLab.com.

SSH key

You need to authenticate to push code to the repositories. The most convenient is an SSH key:

Check if you have a key already and if not create a new one: https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-on-the-Server-Generating-Your-SSH-Public-Key
Add it to your account: https://gitlab.com/-/user_settings/ssh_keys

Working environment

Discussion

Note

We expect participants to work in a local Unix environment on their laptop although working through a remote connection to a central system such as lxplus at CERN is possible for this lesson.

If you are unfamiliar with the Unix shell, you can work through the exercises in The Unix Shell tutorial by Software Carpentry.

Windows users: the Unix tutorial gives git bash as an option. However, for all work during the hands-on session:

do not use git bash
do not use Power shell (apart from installing WSL2)
activate WSL2 and use the Ubuntu terminal that comes with it!

Windows

Activate WSL2 and use the Ubuntu terminal.

MacOS

Use Terminal.app

Linux

Use Terminal

Prerequisites

Know how to clone or create a repository
Have Git configured in the local environment:
- check with
```
git config --list
```
- if email and name are not configured, add them with
```
git config --global user.name "[name]"
git config --global user.email "[email address]"
```
  (Replace [...] with your input, and keep the quotes around your name if there are spaces.)
Understand the concept of local and remote
Know how to add updates from the local area to the remote repository with the usual Git workflow, e.g.:
```
git status
git add .
git commit -m "Message describing your new content"
git push origin main
```