Git and GitHub: checked!
Today marks an important milestone in my developer career: I have successfully managed to get started with Git and Github, including creating my first repo and pushed changes to it.
Here’s a quick rundown of how I did it (references for my future self).
1. Install git
I downloaded the Git Mac installer and run the install.
First challenge: Mac by default uses its own version of git, which is stored in /usr/bin, while the git installer install git in a different directory /usr/local/bin/git/bin.
Note
- You can check out which version your Mac is using by typing this into Terminal
git --versionandwhich git.
I couldn’t really figure out how to change this to make it work. So what I ended up doing was delete the default git file by rm /usr/bin/git and create a symbolic link from the new git to the old git ln -s /usr/local/bin/git/bin/git /usr/bin.
However, even without creating the symlink, Terminal will still search /usr/local/ by default to find git.
##2. Get started using git
I used Chris Coyier’s screencast tutorial on how to get started using Git by cloning a local project, created a new repo on github.com and upload the local project to the remote repo.
##3. Deploying from git
The first git repo I created was a website project I’ve been developing locally. I wanted to use git so that other people could start helping me work on it.
The natural next step for me was to figure out how I could deploy my git commits to a remote server through FTP.
My first thought was using a git hook post-receive, but it seemed awfully complex and difficult.
Dandelion is a much nicer and easier tool to use to deploy. I followed the guide to install it on my Mac and created the config file for each git repo.
Note:
- Use
sudo gem install dandelion, and not justgem install dandelion - For the
excludefiles in config, there should be no tab before the dash – character or it won’t work. - The first deployment might take a while, depending on the size of your repository. But after that, Dandelion is smart enough to only deploy the files that have been added/ changed/ deleted, so it is really quick.
4. Workflow
Now, my new work flow includes:
- Making changes to my working directory
git commit -m 'commit message'git push origin masterdandelion deploy
While it is true that I can’t use automatic deployment with dandelion, I actually prefer to deploy manually like this. I think this would come in handy if I realized that I had made a mistake after a push, I could still go back and make changes before deploying it to my web server.
Another advantage to using this method is that I am deploying from my local git repo. This means that I could push certain files to the server without having them included in the public repo.