Collaborating
Last updated
Was this helpful?
Last updated
Was this helpful?
For the next step, get into pairs. One person will be the “Owner” and the other will be the “Collaborator”. The goal is that the Collaborator add changes into the Owner’s repository. We will switch roles at the end, so both persons will play Owner and Collaborator.
Practicing By Yourself
If you’re working through this lesson on your own, you can carry on by opening a second terminal window. This window will represent your partner, working on another computer. You won’t need to give anyone access on GitHub, because both ‘partners’ are you
The Owner needs to give the Collaborator access. On GitHub, click the “Settings” button on the right, select “Collaborators”, click “Add people”, and then enter your partner’s username.
Next, the Collaborator needs to download a copy of the Owner’s repository to her machine. This is called “cloning a repo”.
The Collaborator doesn’t want to overwrite her own version of practiceGitHub.git, so needs to clone the Owner’s repository to a different location than her own repository with the same name.
To clone the Owner’s repo into her Desktop folder, the Collaborator enters:
Replace ‘BMCBCC’ with the Owner’s username.
If you choose to clone without the clone path (./BMCBCC-practicegit) specified at the end, you will clone inside the current folder! Make sure to navigate to the home directory first.
The Collaborator can now make a change in her clone of the Owner’s repository, exactly the same way as we’ve been doing before:
Output
git add git.txt
git commit -m "add the usage of Git"
Then push the change to the Owner’s repository on GitHub:
Output
Note that we didn’t have to create a remote called origin: Git uses this name by default when we clone a repository. (This is why origin was a sensible choice earlier when we were setting up remotes by hand.)
Take a look at the Owner’s repository on GitHub again, and you should be able to see the new commit made by the Collaborator. You may need to refresh your browser to see the new commit.
Some more about remotes
In this episode and the previous one, our local repository has had a single “remote”, called origin. A remote is a copy of the repository that is hosted somewhere else, that we can push to and pull from, and there’s no reason that you have to work with only one. For example, on some large projects you might have your own copy in your own GitHub account (you’d probably call this origin) and also the main “upstream” project repository (let’s call this upstream for the sake of examples). You would pull from upstream from time to time to get the latest updates that other people have committed.
Remember that the name you give to a remote only exists locally. It’s an alias that you choose - whether origin, or upstream, or fred - and not something intrinsic to the remote repository.
The git remote family of commands is used to set up and alter the remotes associated with a repository. Here are some of the most useful ones:
git remote -v lists all the remotes that are configured (we already used this in the last episode)
git remote add [name] [url] is used to add a new remote
git remote remove [name] removes a remote. Note that it doesn’t affect the remote repository at all - it just removes the link to it from the local repo.
git remote set-url [name] [newurl] changes the URL that is associated with the remote. This is useful if it has moved, e.g. to a different GitHub account, or from GitHub to a different hosting service. Or, if we made a typo when adding it!
git remote rename [oldname] [newname] changes the local alias by which a remote is known - its name. For example, one could use this to change upstream to fred.
To download the Collaborator’s changes from GitHub, the Owner now enters:
In practice, it is good to be sure that you have an updated version of the repository you are collaborating on, so you should git pull before making our changes. The basic collaborative workflow would be:
update your local repo with git pull origin main,
make your changes and stage them with git add,
commit your changes with git commit -m, and
upload the changes to GitHub with git push origin main
It is better to make many commits with smaller changes rather than of one commit with massive changes: small commits are easier to read and review.
To accept access to the Owner’s repo, the Collaborator needs to go to or check for email notification. Once there she can accept access to the Owner’s repo.
