Git and Version Control#
Motivation#
Version control systems, particularly Git, are essential tools for modern power engineers working on complex projects and simulations.
Have you heard of GitHub.com? It is a place where open-source software projects shared, where researchers can find useful code from publications, and developers can collaborate without knowing each other.
Powering GitHub.com is the git version control system. Git is
originally developed by Linus Torvalds, the original developer of the
Linux Kernel, for allowing thousands of people to collaborate
efficiently on kernel development. By “version control”, it means that
the software code is versioned with the changes tracked. When a version
of code does not work, the version control system allows the developer
to roll back to a previous version. If more than one person working on
the same project, they can make changes simultaneously and then “merge”
the code whenever ready.
So, how is this relevant to power engineers? Even if it is not immediately useful, it is a good skill to have. For example, if you found an open-source project on GitHub and want to use it, there are better ways than downloading the project as a Zip file. Also, if you wish to publish your code on GitHub, this module may be useful. We want to provide a walk through so that you know the basic concepts.
Learn by doing - GitHub#
Start by creating a GitHub account at GitHub.com.
Below is a screenshot of my dashboard. Yours may look different, but the layout is always consistent: the left panel is related to your work, the middle is the feeds from your network, and the right is announcements and trending projects.
Repository#
A repository (repo) is a storage for a project. It is like a folder for a project.
Let’s start by creating a new repository. Click on the “New” button on the top-left corner, as shown in the figure above. It will take to the next page, which looks like this:
Feel free to name it anything, such as my-first-repo. You can add a
description but not required. Then, choose if this repo is public
(visible to everyone) or private (visible to you only). For most of our
use cases, we will choose Public.
Scroll down to the bottom and click on the green “Create repository” button. You will be redirected to the repo page.
There are a lot of information to unpack here.
Look at the URL. It is
https://github.com/{your_username}/{repo_name}.git. This is the URL you will use to interact with the repo.In the “Quick setup” section, you can see the address to clone the repo.
Installing Git#
Now that you have a repo on GitHub, let’s switch to your local machine. This is where you will do most of your work.
In your WSL, you need to install git first. Here, git is the
software you will use to interact with the repo.
sudo apt-get install git --yes
You will be asked to enter your password. When done, you will have the
git command available.
For more information, refer to the previous section on package management.
Setting up SSH keys#
TODO
Clone the repository#
The command to bring the repository to your local machine is called
clone.
git clone https://github.com/{your_username}/{repo_name}.git
This will create a folder called {repo_name} in your current
directory, with the repo contents.