Howtogetcode

Basics

• You'll be working with the terminal. I prefer iTerm over the default Mac terminal, but do whatever. iterm: http://iterm.sourceforge.net/
• You hopefully remember a little bit of UNIXy stuff from undergrad. If not, shoot me email on stuff you don't know how to do. Some are here: http://www.washington.edu/computing/unix/unixqr.html
• GitHub is based on Git, a version control system. Git is fairly new, but is really powerful and pretty sweet. When/if you start writing code, you'll need to know more about how it operates, but for now, here are the basics:
• Version control systems in general provide a centralized view of the code. It serves as a backup, and also has many features about keeping the codebase sane. This is harder when you've got many developers, and many pieces of code to support - these aren't really problems for us. But it still provides nice abstractions like the most recent set of changes, which can get viewed/rolled back/etc.
• So, for now, you'll just be pulling code from this central code repo. I'll be pushing stuff into it periodically.

Steps

• Download and install Macports. Macports is a tool for getting/updating software. http://www.macports.org/. There isn't a GUI for this. so you'll be using it on the command-line.
• Fire up Macports. In the command-line, you need to type sudo port. Port is the command to open MacPorts. sudo runs it as an admin, which it needs to install software. You'll get prompted for a password, and your normal Mac password should be fine.
• Once in MacPorts, you should see a new MacPorts prompt like : [Projects/prdict] >
• At these prompts, you can do things like install, search, uninstall, list. If you type list, you can see all the available projects.
• install *name* installs a program. The ones we want are: git-core, python25, python25-googleappengine. There might be more later.
• Those should all install and download all the dependencies they need. If you're curious, the binaries go into /opt/local/bin by default.
• Now we need to be able to run those new programs. If you're using a bash shell, you need to add the following to ~/.bash_profile: export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH. If you don't know what shell you're using, you can find out by typing echo $SHELL
• Now type git --version We need to make sure you can run the programs you just downloaded.
• Setup SSH keys for your account, so that GitHub can identify you. The Github instructions are good : http://help.github.com/mac-key-setup// Let me know if that doesn't work for you.
• Then you're all set: git clone [email protected]:mattrjacobs/Prdict.git should work and download the code from GitHub.