4_CloneWebsite.md

Clone Team Web Site

For our team project we will work on a website that will NOT be publicly available. It will only run locally on your invidual machines.

This repository will be a simple web page that everyone contributes to. Contribution will be limited to adding personal info to the website. Please note that letters in between greater than and less than ( <example> ) are examples and % is the Terminal prompt.

1. In Terminal, navigate to your work folder and create a new folder for the exercise:

%mkdir c14Website 

2. In Terminal, change to the folder:

%cd c14Website  

3. Clone the directory. You can get the clone address by navigating to the repository in a web browser and clicking on the green "<>Code" button and copying the HTTPS URL address

In Terminal, clone the repository using the copied URL:

%git clone https://github.com/TechCohort14/TA100-GitFlowWebsite.git 	 

At this point you can move into the repository folder you created:

%cd TA100-GitFlowWebsite

4. Create a branch for your changes:

Once you have a clone of the repository you will be on the main/master branch. Best practice is to NOT make changes to the main/master branch. Why is it so important to not make changes to the main branch? One word: deployable. It is your production code, ready to roll out into the world. The master/main branch is meant to be stable, and it is the social contract of open source software to never, ever push anything to master that is not tested, or that breaks the build. The entire reason GitHub works is that it is always safe to work from the master.

Now that the importance of the main/master branch is established, let's create a branch to work in. Projects will have naming conventions for files, folder, branches (i.e. by issue, by feature, hotfix, ticket number, etc.), and coding. For our project, when creating a branch, make sure to follow this naming convention for branches: firstnameFeature

First name is lowercase, the first letter of the "Feature" is uppercase. Suppose team member Ryan is working on updating the picture; then the branch name would be:
ryanPicture

%git checkout -b <firstnameFeature> 

The %git checkout -b is doing TWO commands at once and is good practice. It is creating a branch AND checking it out with option -b.

To just create a branch you can use the following command: git branch <branchName>. However, you will have to remember to checkout the new branch. Otherwise, you will be making changes to the main/master branch, which means you would be breaking the social contract! To avoid this painful mistake of forgetting to switch to a newly created branch when creating a new branch just use:
%git checkout -b

To just switch to a branch use: git checkout <branchName>. We will use this later on.

5. Check branch status:

Always check to see what branch you are on. To check to see what branch you are working on enter the following command in Terminal:

%git status 

If after you check the status you notice you are not on correct branch, STOP! To checkout (switch) to the correct branch enter the following:

%git checkout <yourfirstnameFeature> 

Check your status again. This my seem repetitive, but when first starting to work with branches, many developers forget to switch to the newly created branch. If you don't change to the correct branch you will be making changes to the main/master branch and your changes will NOT be accepted. Essentially, you will have lost your chnages 😢.

6. Now you can push this branch up to GitHub:

Let's make sure that we push this branch to GitHub. That way we can create a pull request to have our changes merged to the main/master repository later on.

%git push –u origin <branch name> 

7. Check that the branch has been successfully pushed up. To confirm that the branch has been pushed, head over to GitHub and click the "branches" drop-down. You should see the branch there:

Now that you have a local branch and have it showing up remotely you can contribute your assigned changes to the website.

Next - Step 5: Changes to Website: