Day[8] – JS30 on pause & How to keep your Local Repos are updated from Github

I have been working mostly on javascript30.com as part of my #100DaysOfCode Challenge. It has been so far and I have created some projects through it (Checkout my previous posts to see them).

However, I have to hit the pause button on to focus on the projects I’m involved in. In particular, I am focusing on my chingu project to clone the Atomist.com site.

Chingu is a global collaboration program where you get grouped into about 4 people from all around the globe. It helps you gain experience in developing in a remote collaborative setting. We use agile, git, github, and other processes and technologies that a “regular” development team uses to simulate real world settings.

Aside from this, I am also part of 4 other collaborative projects born out of the Grow with Google and Udacity Development Challenge that I was selected for. Here are the projects that I am involved in.

Project Newbs – A half clone / Half original project. We are building a site that showcases the Cities we are from

Project NJ – This is an original project. We will be building a contact book. The goal is for us to gain experience in building a front end app.

JS Lessons – The site will be a reference for anything JS related – terms, functions, and more.

Goldenleash.com – We are rebuilding an existing business’ site to make it more responsive and to give it a more modern look.

Because of all these lined up projects, most of which are due in about a month, I have to focus on them.

Making sure that your Project Repos are always up to date

So, to start off this crazy next few weeks, I started working on the chingu project. For the current sprint, I am working on the nav bar.  In order to make sure that there are no conflicts, I need to make sure that I am always working on the most current code base.

Here’s how you would do that. I’ll actually start from the beginning and walk you through copying the files locally (These instructions assume that you have git installed).

Initial Setup

1. Go to your repo on github and copy the Repo link by clicking the clone button
2. Issue this command on your terminal (make sure you are on the directory you want to place your codebase on).
   – git clone YOURREPO
   – YOURREPO should be the link you copied from step 1
3. If your team has a development branch, go to that branch
   – git checkout development
   – The checkout keyword switches you from the current branch to development
   – NOTE: your development branch may be called something else
   – ALWAYS update this branch, don’t touch the master branch
4. To start working, create a branch for your feature.
   – git checkout -b feature/addNavBar
   – -b creates the branch and then switch you to the feature branch – in this case, this branch is called feature/addNavBar

While Working

Now, say you are done coding today and you call it a day. The next day you return to your work. This is what you should do to make sure your code is updated.

1. Go to your development branch if you aren’t on it yet
   – git checkout development
2. Get the latest code from Github
   – git pull
   – You can also use git pull origin development
3. Go back to your feature branch
   – git checkout feature/addNavBar
4. Merge your branch with new code (I would copy any code you currently have just to be safe before doing this)
   – git merge development
5. Start working

Now if you are working off of a fork, it’s about the same but a little different. Here’s the set up.

1. Fork the repo on github
2. Follow the steps 1-3 from the Initial Setup section above.
3. Add a connection to the original repo
   – git remote add upstrem ORIGINALREPOLINK
4. – git pull upstream master
5. Follow step 4 on Initial Setup

After that, working on a fork is the same as working from an original repo.

I hope that helps out! Also, wish me luck with all these projects!