GitHub Workflow Activity

Participants, in teams of 2-3, work through a series of scenarios to learn how to contribute to a remote git repository using a common workflow.

The activity first has students practice contributing to a repository in which they are owners/maintainers. Later parts of the activity have the students contribute to a repository that they do not own or maintain.

Required Resources

• Participants: 4+, working in teams of 2-3.
• Each team needs
  • A computer with
    • git installed and configured
    • A plaintext editor
    • A command-line interface
    • A browser
    • A working Internet connection with ports open for SSH, HTTPS, and HTTP
  • A GitHub account (at least one member of each team)

Required Knowledge and Skills

Participants must be able to:

• Local git repository operations:
  • Stage changes
  • Commit changes
  • Check the status of the repository
• Command-line operations:
  • Change working directory (cd)
• Filesystem operations:
  • Create, rename, move, and delete directories and files
• Plaintext editor operations:
  • Edit and save a file

Learning Outcomes

Participants will be able to:

• Use a common workflow to contribute code to a project on GitHub
  • Clone a local repository from a remote repository on GitHub
  • Create a remote in local repository to a remote repository
  • (advanced) Prepare a fork and local repository to contribute changes to an upstream project on GitHub
  • Prepare a branch to work on a feature or bug
    • Create a local branch
    • Push a local branch to a remote
  • Update repository with changes from upstream
    • Fetch upstream changes into local repository
    • Rebase feature branch onto upstream development branch
    • Resolve conflicts
  • Push changes to remote
  • Force push changes to remote
  • Squash commits
  • (advanced) Issue a pull-request on GitHub

Contents

• activity.md - Activity participants work through.
• reference.md - Detailed description of the workflow.
• virefcard.pdf - Quick reference of vi commands

Facilitation

I have found that it typically takes about 1.5 70 minute class periods to complete this activity.

Day 1:

• 5 min:
  • Form teams
  • Hand out activity.md and reference.md, one hardcopy per team
  • Hand out vi reference card
• 65 min:
  • Teams work through activity.md

Day 2:

• 5-10 min: Do a quick overview of the workflow (what does push do, what does checkout do, how are the local and remote repositories related to each other, etc.)
• 30-35 min: Continue working through activity.md

License

(c) 2018 Amy Csizmar Dalal, modified from the original. (c) 2016 Darci Burdge and Stoney Jackson SOME RIGHTS RESERVED

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ .