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Getting Started with Development
The following guides will be useful for those new to software development with GitHub:
https://guides.github.com/activities/hello-world/
https://guides.github.com/introduction/git-handbook/
There are other guides as well which can be found in https://guides.github.com/.
The following are instructions for getting started with development on the Proteus project:
On the project homepage, click on the Fork button in the upper-right corner. This will make a copy of the Proteus repository in your GitHub account. This copy will have identical branches as the original repository but it will not track the original repository. So updates on the original repository will not be reflected in your fork by default. This is not a huge issue because we can handle that with remotes discussed in section 3.
Make a local copy of your fork.
When you push/pull changes into your local repository, it is done based on a remote repository (the one on GitHub). You can check which remotes are associated with your repository through git remote -v. By default, there will be a remote named origin which is associated with where you cloned your repository. You can add the original repo as a remote as well through
git remote add upstream git@github.com:erdc/proteus.git.
You can then get updates from the upstream remote through
git fetch upstream.
The keyword upstream was arbitrarily chosen; it can in fact be anything you choose (e.g. radish, puppy, originalRepo, etc.).
Once you've added the remote and updated it, you can start developing based on the master branch:
git checkout upstream/master
You now have a local copy of the original repository's master branch. If you want to add additional features, you can do
git checkout -b nameOfBranch
and then make the commits as usual. When you need to push to a remote repository, you should push to origin, your fork of the original repository:
git push -u origin nameOfBranch.
From the fork, you can then start a pull request against the original repository with your feature branch.
The process may seem unnecessarily long, but it helps keep the original repository free of unnecessary branches and of unintended changes.
In the event of a history rewrite, you can salvage your local feature branches that have different history through rebasing. The goal of rebasing is to take the commits that are relevant to your feature branch and apply it in order to the head of the master branch. There are good resources to help understand this approach such as Atlassian.
Assuming you've set up a fork and updated the remotes, checkout a local branch that tracks the master branch of proteus.git
git checkout upstream/master
Then create a copy of this branch
git checkout -b trackingMaster
Now checkout your feature branch (you might have to use the -f)
git checkout featureBranch
Make a copy of that branch
git checkout -b featureBranch_rebase
Now rebase interactively
git rebase -i trackingMaster featureBranch_rebase
This will bring up a list of commits that you can keep or discard in an editor. You need to find all the commits that are unique to featureBranch and discard the remainder of the commits. Once the final list is obtained, you quit the editor and the rebasing operation begins. For each commit, you may need to resolve conflicts. Do so carefully, add the conflicting files, and then continue with git rebase --continue