Git and GitHub Workflow For Version Control

Previously, you learned how to fork GitHub repositories to make copies of other users’ repositories, and you also learned how to download copies of (i.e. clone) GitHub repositories to your computer. On this page, you will learn to setup git on your computer:

Configure git Username and Email On Your Computer

The first time that you use git on a computer, you will need to configure your GitHub.com username and email address. This information will be used to document who made changes to files in git. It is important to use the same email address and username that you setup on GitHub.com.

You can set your Github.com username in the terminal by typing:

$ git config --global user.name "username".

Next, you can set the email for your Github.com account by typing:

$ git config --global user.email "email@email.com".

Using the --global configuration option, you are telling git to use these settings for all git repositories that you work with on your computer. Note that you only have to configure these settings one time on your computer.

You can check your config settings for user.name and user.email using the following commands:

git config user.name which returns the username that you set previously

git config user.email which returns the email that you set previously

These configuration settings ensure that changes you make to repositories are attributed to your username and email.

Setup Your Preferred Text Editor

There are many text editors available for use with Git. Some such as Nano, Sublime and Vim are fully command line based. These are useful when you are working on remote servers and Linux and are often the default text editors for most computers. You may want to switch your git default text editor to a gui based editor to make things easier when you are getting started.

Data Tip More on setting a default text editor from GitHub. If the text editors below don’t work for you, you can visit this page to learn more about other options such as Notepad++ for windows.

Installing Atom as a Default Text Editor

If you aren’t sure what text editor you want to use, and you are on a MAC or PC we suggest Atom which is a powerful and free text editor that also has git and github support! If you are on a MAC, before using Atom at the command line, you will need to install the shell command line tools. To get these tools installed

1. open up Atom
2. Go to the Atom drop down at the very top of your screen.
3. Select “Install Shell Commands”

The steps above will allow you to run atom file-name-here in bash to open the Atom text editor. Once you have Atom installed, you can run the command below in bash to set Atom to be the default text editor:

git config --global core.editor "atom --wait"

This command will set atom to be your default text editor for all operations.

Setting Nano as a Default Text Editor For JupyterHub Environments

If you are using a linux based JupyterHub (similar to what we use for our earth analytics course), we suggest setting the default text editor to Nano:

git config --global core.editor nano

This command will set nano to be your default text editor for all operations.