Continuous Integration
Find the assignment in Canvas:
Open it in a new tab:
The very first time, you'll have to authorize firstdraft to manage your GitHub repositories (you may have to sign in to GitHub). Don't forget to grant access to the organization that we just created (probably named
[YOUR USERNAME]-firstdraft-projects).
The very first time, it will ask you for your CircleCI API Token:
To get one, go to CircleCI and sign up with your GitHub account. Then, go to "User Settings" in the left sidebar and find "Personal API Tokens". Generate one and then copy-paste it back into the form:
Make your first change to the code to make some progress:
In the bottom-right corner, notice the button that says "Git"; click on it:
Git is an extremely versatile tool that developers use to collaborate; for now, we're going to adopt a fairly simple but powerful workflow. First, in the pane at the top, you can see the changes that you've made highlighted:
What we'll always want to start by doing when we begin on a new feature is create a branch. You can do that in the pane on the right just below the changes. Choose any name that you like (keep it fairly short):
Now that we're on a new branch for our experimental work, let's take a snapshot of the current state of the project after the changes that we've made so far by making a commit. You can do that in the pane on the left just below the changes. Enter a short title (required), and a longer description (optional):
Now that you've taken a snapshot of your work, it's saved for posterity and no matter how terribly wrong things go from here, it will be easy to snap back to this state; so you can experiment freely on future tasks. Let's push this snapshot up to GitHub.com so it's saved in the cloud:
Then, "Open a pull request into master":
Pull Requests have developed into the central atomic unit by which software development moves forward; we'll discuss many techniques for using them effectively to make your teams stronger in future classes. For now, click "Create pull request":
That's it, for now! Over time, we'll talk about how this workflow pays tremendous dividends if everyone on the team adheres to it. For now, just remember to create branches freely while experimenting with solving new problems, because it's very easy to jump between them in case you want to start over; and make lots of commits so that you never lose work.
Last modified 5yr ago