Collaborative notetaking

Overview

Teaching: 0 min
Exercises: 60 min

Questions

Objectives

• To practice working with Git and a remote repository

To practice the interactions learned today, we will collect our notes on Git into a single repository. While this is an example of how to collaborate using Git/GitHub, we won’t be taking advantage of all the collaborative features of Git because we will not be editing each other’s files.

Most of the errors you are likely to encounter with Git will arise when trying to deal with conflicting changes made by two people to the same file. Learning how to merge conflicting commits in this situation is more than we can cover in one day and so we will avoid the situation.

Challenge: Work together

Create a new project that clones the Course notes repo

Under the git folder, you will see folders for a range of topics/commands.

Record your notes from the session in the relevant folders. Save the files as <YOUR_NAME>-notes.txt to avoid conflicts with other participant’s notes.

Remember to commit and push at appropriate points.

Pull changes from the remote repo to see your classmates notes.

Warning

With lots of people pushing to a repository at once, you will encounter some issues that don’t occur often in day to day usage. Git will not let you push to a remote repository if someone has already pushed their own changes to it. If you try, you might see an error like this:

To https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git
 ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git'
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected
Merge the remote changes (e.g. 'git pull') before pushing again.  See the
'Note about fast-forwards' section of 'git push --help' for details.

In order to correct this, you will need to first get the new changes from the remote repository on to your own computer, before sending your changes to GitHub.

The error message gives you a hint in how to do this:

• First pull any new changes from GitHub onto your computer
• Then push the most up to date files, along with your new changes, to GitHub

Challenge: Know your tools

Today we have introduced you to three new tools:

• Git
• GitHub
• RStudio

Write a short paragraph on each of these describing what each tool does, and how they interact with each other. Commit it to our notes repository in the tools folder.

Key Points

• Commit and push often to have a meaningful backup of your work

• Make your commit messages meaningful