Git is a
This document documents a minimal set of commands for using Git in this course to submit assignments and acquire skeleton files. It is not any kind of tutorial or introduction to Git. Consult this Git documentation for an overview of Git and details of its various commands.
If you are working from your own machine, be sure to install Git, if it is not already installed. There are downloads available for various systems on this site.
Next, install the appropriate ssh private key for access to our repositories that live on the instructional machines. First, get an instructional account for CS164 if you don't already have one. There, you'll find a directory ~/.ssh, with files id_rsa and id_rsa.pub, which contain, respectively, the private and public ssh keys used by our repositories. For non-Windows systems, copy id_rsa to your home computer's .ssh directory, giving it a unique name other than id_rsa (for example, cs164_id_rsa.) Otherwise, you are liable to overwrite a secret key file of that name that you might have created for your own purposes. You can get ssh to use this key when appropriate by adding a line
IdentityFile ~/.ssh/cs164_id_rsato the file .ssh/config (creating that file if it does not already exist.) WARNING: The instructions above do not apply to the instructional machines, where your ssh key is already set up.
In what follows, we'll consider a student named Fred with login cs164-xxx. Having installed Git, Fred first performs some general configuration that will apply to all repositories used from his account (for this course or elsewhere):
$ git config --global user.name "Fred Student" $ git config --global user.email "fred.student@somemail.com" $ git config --global push.default simpleThe first two lines set the name and email that Git will record in commits and logs. The last line is a safety measure that affects the
git push
command described later.
Git terminology uses the term repository to mean an organized
collection of versions (called commits) of a directory structure;
plus a checked-out copy of the one of those commits
(a working directory), possibly in the process of modification; plus
a staging area (called the index) used to build another commit.
Usually,
the set of commits and the index are
stored in a directory named .git
at the
top level of the working directory. The term bare repository refers
to a directory containing only the set of commits (what would be a
.git
directory in an ordinary repository, but with no index).
Typically, we use bare repositories as central copies of versions that will be
shared by several repositories.
Each student and each team in this class has a bare Git repository in which to develop and submit assignments. More specifically, for homework, we provide a set of bare repositories under the cs164-taa account, which authorized students may clone, pull from, or push to as desired. Later, you will get a separate Github repository.
Fred establishes a working directory containing a local copy of his private repository in a directory (let's say ~/cs164-hw) on his home and/or instructional account with the command
$ git clone cs164-taa@ashby.cs.berkeley.edu:users/cs164-xxx cs164-hwThis will create Fred's personal bare repository on cs164-taa (if necessary) and copy its contents into the new local working directory cs164-hw as cs164-hw/.git. If there is a head version in that repository (as will happen when Fred creates a second local repository after having committed a few versions), it will be checked out to form the initial contents of the working directory (which is otherwise empty). Fred can use cs164-hw for one-person assignments—generally homework.
There will be various resources that we provide, including skeleton files for projects and assignments. Fred can add a reference to these resources to his repository with the commands
$ cd ~/cs164-hw $ git remote add shared cs164-taa@ashby.cs.berkeley.edu:shared
When Fred clones his repository for the first time, he'll get a message to the effect that he has cloned an empty repository. We suggest that he start things off like this:
$ git fetch shared $ git checkout -b master shared/Initial $ git push -u origin masterThis has the effect of making sure that all branches, submissions, and repositories have the same commit as their ultimate ancestor. This command sequence should never be repeated here or in any other clone of this repository.
Keep each assignment, ASSGN, in a subdirectory of that name in your working Git directory. Typically, we provide an initial set of files for each assignment. Fred can initialize his own assignment directory, say for hw3, like this:
$ cd ~/cs164-hw $ git fetch shared $ git merge shared/hw3 -m "Start assignment hw3." $ git push -u originThis fetches the staff's hw3 skeleton files from
cs164-taa
, then
merges a copy of that hw3 into his local repository on the master branch.
Finally, it copies the updated master branch back to his bare
repository on cs164-taa
.
Work on hw3 now proceeds as a sequence of edits and commits. After editing,
adding, and deleting files, Fred first informs Git of new any new files that it
should start tracking. For example, if when working on hw3, Fred creates
files test1.inp
and test1.out
, he would use the
command
$ git add test1.inp test1.out(from inside the directory
~/cs164-hw/hw3
).
Or, if these files are stored in a new subdirectory called
hw3/testing
, he can use the command
$ git add testingOnce he adds any new files, he can create a new commit with
$ git commit -aThis will prompt him to write a log entry for the new commit. Descriptive log entries are generally a good idea, especially for complex team projects where one is trying to keep each other informed of what changes made and why.
Periodically, Fred will want to transmit his work to his personal
repository on cs164-taa
, from which
he cloned his local repository.
This is especially true when he intends to hand it in
or make further edits from a different local
repository. After the initial cloning of the repository,
the command to do so is
just
$ git pushwhich, since Fred has used the procedures described in this document for configuration and for creating assignments, will by default push the current branch (typically, the master branch for Fred's personal repository) to the remote repository that it is tracking (his repository on
cs164-taa
). He can also write it out
more explicitly as
$ git push origin master
Don't push things, however, without first committing any outstanding
changes. Git's distributed nature means that you can create an
arbitrarily long sequence of commits before pushing them (but don't do
this unless you have to: every moment you don't commit is another
opportunity for your dog to urinate on your laptop and cause you to
lose all your work.) It's not necessary to be connected to the
cs164-taa
repositories (or indeed, the Internet) to use
Git's version-control features.
The staff does not immediately see changes to your local repositories.
That is, when you
modify, add, or delete a file or when you execute git commit
, we
do not see these changes, since your repository
under cs164-taa
is not changed. To be seen by us,
your commits must be pushed, as described in the preceding section.
Furthermore, we don't treat all your commits, even when pushed, as submissions until you mark them as such. To submit one of your committed versions, create (and subsequently push) an appropriately named tag. For example, when Fred first wants to submit hw3, then after committing any changes in his hw3 directory, he can do this:
$ git tag hw3-1Submission is not complete until he pushes the work to us:
$ git push # To push the hw3 branch (if not yet done) $ git push --tags # To push hw3-1 (and any other tags)
Subsequent submissions should be named hw3-2
, hw3-3
,
etc. We take the highest-numbered tag as Fred's final submission.
He can submit at any time, even when he has many intervening
commits. For example, if he has submitted hw3-1
and
hw3-2
and decides that the last submission is bogus, and the first
one was better, he can execute
$ git tag hw3-3 hw3-1which makes
hw3-3
, the latest submission,
a synonym for hw3-1
. Alternatively, if the commit he wants to
submit was not previously tagged, Fred can
find its unique id using git log
and then tag that. For example,
he might see
$ git log commit ff39e11f5e292a0c81f3cb65c2a39c7b301a595a Author: Fred StudentNow to submit the second commit back (from 1/26) as his first submission, he could executeDate: Tue Jan 27 16:32:17 2015 -0800 Experimentally refactor my solution to problem 3. commit 4f7d9e65744c8b528289746bf911cb81ded7c5e2 Author: Fred Student Date: Wed Jan 26 15:36:28 2015 -0800 Add tests. No errors detected so far. commit 2aea9782d7000bb07277617b9f81bea485374d27 Author: Fred Student Date: Wed Jan 22 15:34:55 2015 -0800 Begin work one hw3.
$ git tag hw3-1 4f7d9e(The unique ids in Git are hexadecimal SHA-1 hashcodes of the contents of the commits. You only need to specify a sufficiently long prefix of the hashcode to uniquely identify which commit you mean.)
Again, after adding any new tags, Fred must use git push --tags
to push them
to the repository that the staff (and autograder) see.
Submission dates and times will be taken
from the time of the commit tagged by hw3-
n, and
You can delete a tag locally, but we have set up the repository to prevent you
from doing this on cs164-taa
's repositories. It shouldn't be
necessary in any case, since the autograder will
ignore tags that don't refer to known assignments and you can always
supercede a tag with a higher-numbered one.
cs164-xxx
and
team OurTeam
.
$ git config --global user.name "Fred Student" $ git config --global user.email "fred.student@somemail.com" $ git config --global push.default simple # Suggested
cs164-hw
and connect it up our shared repository:
$ git clone cs164-taa@ashby.cs.berkeley.edu:users/cs164-xxx cs164-hw $ cd cs164-hw $ git remote add shared cs164-taa@ashby.cs.berkeley.edu:shared
ASSGN
(e.g., hw3
),
from our template:
$ cd cs164-repo # If not already there $ git merge shared/ASSGN -m "Starting assignment ASSGN." $ git push
$ git statusThe message will tell you how to undo changes from the last commit, should you want to.
$ git add F
$ git commit -aThis does nothing with untracked files.
cs164-taa
) repository:
$ git push
cs164-taa
repository that have been
pushed from another local directory (commit current work first):
$ git pull --rebase
$ git tag ASSGN-n $ git push $ git push --tagswhere n is a sequence number larger than those of existing tags.
$ git tag