Quick and Dirty Introduction to Git for MATH 351

Say you’ve got a URL to one of our GitHub worksheet repositories, e.g. https://github.com/ChicoStateMATH351Spring25/homework-02-roualdes. You should have access to such a private repository for each specific assignment within your GitHub account. Submitting an assignment will generally follow these steps: copy the assingment from the GitHub repository, edit files, and push the files back up to the assignment’s repository. I will then grade your assignment from your repository.

With a working installation of git on your machine, you will generally follow these steps from within a (git) bash terminal where

$ git --version

successfully returns a version number for git and specifically with no error message.

$ cd ~/...wherever.../math351/homework/

clone

clone – copy the assignment to your machine

This will copy the entire repository (directory on GitHub) to your current working directory $ pwd. Be sure you’re in a reasonable directory before executing the below command.

$ git clone https://github.com/ChicoStateMATH351Spring25/homework-02-roualdes.git

this is my repository for Homework 02; you need to find your own for each assignment

edit

edit - do the assignment as appropriate

notice that edit is not a git command

Since all worksheets assignments are turned in as Jupyter Notebook documents, open a notebook file within your current working dirctory, then edit the file. You will submit the notebook.

status

status - check the status of local git directory

If you editted any files, notice that all added or edited files are now marked as modified and/or not tracked. Pushing edits to a repository is a three step process: add, commit, push. We will execute the following status check after each step to help us learn Git as we go, but generally you can just add, commit, and push with nothing in between, when you are comfortable with this.

$ git status

add

add - stage your added/modified files

For reasons we won’t explain in this class, before you can finalize your edits we must stage the files we wish to push. Assume you want to submit the file hw.ipynb. To stage this file execute

$ git add hw.ipynb

You can identify more files to add by separating the file names with spaces.

If, in this step, I find that you are taking shortcuts that make my life more difficult I will subtract points from your assignment.

Check the status again after adding file(s).

commit

commit - confirm the added changes

Commiting some changes to your local git directory is the formal way to lock in added changes (locally).

$ git commit -m "a short message describing the edits goes here in quotes"

Just for learning, check the status after commiting file(s).

push

push - send the commited changes to the remote repository

pushing to your remote repository (the one I can see on GitHub) is the formal way to lock in commitd changes (remotely).

$ git push

You can confirm that your worksheets was properly submit by viewing the GitHub repository online. The repository we’ve been working with is located at https://github.com/ChicoStateMATH351Spring25/homework-02-roualdes, which you won’t be able to see because it’s private. It’s highlighted here so you can see that it’s nearly the same link as the one we cloned from.