Practicing Your Workflow

This exercise is the foundation of your workflow for the whole course. You will practice creating GitHub repositories, cloning them on your computer, creating files with the Command Line Interface (CLI), adding to the staging area, committing, and pushing all of the changes to GitHub.

Exercise

• Step 1: Assuming you're logged in to your GitHub profile, create a new repository and name it "Workflow". For now, ignore README, .gitignore, and license settings (you will learn more about them further into your developer career).
• Step 2: GitHub should show you a couple of ways to connect your local git to GitHub. On top, you should see a blue box with the heading like this: "Quick setup — if you’ve done this kind of thing before". There are two buttons, "HTTPS" and "SSH". Click on the latter and copy the line. (It should look like this: "git@github.com:[your-user-name]/workflow.git").
• Step 3: Open up your OS's CLI.
• Step 4: Navigate into the desired folder, where you'll be storing all of your exercise and project folders, using the cd command.
• Step 5: Type in git clone and paste the copied SSH key from Step 2. (Usually, Ctrl + V doesn't work in CLIs. Try Ctrl + Shift + V. Alternatively, you can manually type the SSH key).
• Step 6: Use the ls command (or your OS's alternative) to see whether the folder was added. Then, navigate into it.
• Step 7: Create a file named first.py and open it with code .. (Technically, you open the folder, not the file, but it doesn't matter for our purposes).
• Step 8: Write print('Hello, world!') in that file.
• Step 9: Now you need to add the file to the staging area, commit it, and push it to the repository. You have two ways of doing it: via CLI or VS Code. We highly recommend using the second way at least until the end of the Basics course, because you need to practice with the CLI. However, we will show you both: Step 10 pertains to the CLI, while step 11 pertains to VS Code.
• Step 10.1: In your CLI, type git status. It will show you the changes made to your file.
• Step 10.2: Type git add .. This command adds all of the files into a staging area. Type git status again and check that the file was added.
• Step 10.3: Type git commit -m "First commit". This command makes a commit to the repository. The commits, however, stay on your local machine until you push them into the remote (Github) repository. (Type git status to see that the files are not in the staging area anymore).
• Step 10.4: Type git push origin main to push the changes into GitHub.
• Step 10.5: Go to the GitHub repository you created for this exercise and refresh the page. You should see the changes reflected here.
• Step 11.1: In your VS Code, the third button from the top on the sidebar on the left is your source control tab. Click on it.
• Step 11.2: Click on a "+" button to add the file to the staging area.
• Step 11.3: Write "First commit" in the textbox on top and click the "commit" button right below it.
• Step 11.4: Refresh your GitHub repository and you should see your first.py file there.

Conclusion

Remember to follow this workflow for each exercise and project that requires you to set up your repository.