Telling Sourcetree about one of my GitHub repositories

Editing a file and updating GitHub.com’s copy with the changes

Editing the file

1. One of the files now on my computer files is “readme.md” a plaintext file with a “useful explanation about my repository.”
   (Right now, it doesn’t actually say anything but “Testing 1 2 3” inside of it.)
2. Editing was simple:
   I opened C:\example\GitRepos\VeryCoolRepositoryNumber1\readme.md in Notepad++ on my computer and change the “1 2 3” to “4 5 6,” then saved the file on my computer.

If I go into SourceTree, I have “Awesome Repo 1” open as a tab across the top.

(If not, I can click the “+” tab and open it from the list of repos at right.)

Clicking around, I can see that there are various places where I can see alerts that I’ve changed the contents of “readme.md” on my hard drive.

Diversion: “anonymizing” myself a bit

Before I go any further, though, I have one more piece of “setup” I want to do with “Awesome Repo 1.”

1. From the navigation bar at the top of SourceTree, I click “Repository” -> “Repository Settings.”
2. The popup starts displaying the contents of a tab called “Remotes” with a cloud icon that has a single item in its list, “https://[email protected]/MYGITHUBUSERNAME/testprivaterepo”.
   But I’m going to click the “Advanced” tab with a gear icon.
3. Under “User Information,” I’m going to make sure that “Full Name” & “Email address” are set to values that I am comfortable making part of the repository’s history.
   You see, I first set up SourceTree with some work accounts, and I keep a meaningful name and work e-mail address as the default because that’s my primary use of SourceTree.
   However, for personal side projects, I’d rather use something a bit more … anonymous.
4. So I’m going to change the username to “xyzzy” and the email address to “[email protected]” and make sure “Use global user settings” is un-checked.
5. Then I click “OK.”

Verifying my “anonymization” took hold

1. If I go into File Status -> Working Copy (left nav), I can see that my old info is still there, near the bottom of the screen, below the “Staged Files” & “Unstaged Files” sections of the screen.
2. So I close and re-open SourceTree.
   (Lots of stuff gets better in SourceTree when you close and re-open it.)
3. Now if I have “Awesome Repo 1” open and go to (left nav) File Status -> Working Copy, I can see at the bottom of the screen that I’m identified as “xyzzy <[email protected]>”.

Yay.

“Staging” (“adding”) my changes

If I click on the orange pencil icon next to “readme.md” in the “Unstaged files” list, to the right of the “Staged Files” & “Unstaged Files” sections of the screen, content appears under the heading “readme.md” and shows me that I’ve deleted a line from my file containing the text “Testing 1 2 3” and added a line in its place called “Testing 4 5 6.”

Great! That’s what I expected to see.

I “stage” readme.md by:

1. Clicking “Stage Selected” (or “Stage All”, I suppose)

If I suddenly think, “Wait! Am I sure I wanted to do that?” I can still see the changes by clicking on “readme.md” up in the “Staged Files” section of the screen, center, near the top – the changes will again show up along the right side of the screen.

Here, I just changed one file, but I could totally stage multiple files as part of a given “change” I want to “track.”

“Committing” and “Pushing” my changes

Once I feel good about my changes, I have two things to do (although I can do them at the same time, which I typically do).

1. The first is called a “Commit” and adds an official history checkpoint to the “version tracking” logs stored in Git on my local computer, with an optional (but recommended) comment saying what I did that was so worth adding to the logs.
2. The second is called a “Push” to my “remote repository” and shoots the updated “readme.md” file contents, as well as the “version tracking log with its comment,” over to github.com, in response to which github.com will update its copy of “readme.md” and add the “version change note” to its log. In other words, I’ll get the copy on github.com in sync with the copy on my local computer.

Near the bottom of the screen (remember, I need to be in the “File Status -> Working Copy” section of SourceTree), there’s an area that says “xyzzy <[email protected]>” next to a little blank-headshot icon.

Below that is an area to type a comment.

1. In the comment box, I’ll type, “This is my first change from a local computer.”
2. THEN – and this is the part that lets me do “commit” and “push” at the same time – I will click the checkbox directly beneath the comment area (at left) that says, “Push changes immediately to origin/master.”
3. NOW I will click the “Commit” button at bottom-right.
4. If I forgot to click the checkbox, the “Push” button near the top left area of SourceTree will have a “1” in a circle; I can click it to do the “push” step (just click “OK” through all the prompts, basically).

Verifying that GitHub.com is up-to-date

Now if I navigate in my web browser to https://github.com/MYGITHUBUSERNAME/testprivaterepo/blob/master/readme.md, I can see that its contents say “Testing 4 5 6.” Great!

And if I click the “History” button on that page, it takes me to https://github.com/MYGITHUBUSERNAME/testprivaterepo/commits/master/readme.md, and I can see that there’s a line of the history from “xyzzy” claiming, “This is my first change from a local computer.” Fantastic!

Editing again and updating GitHub.com again

From here on out, to edit files on my computer and tell GitHub.com about them, I just repeat the steps above – open up files in Notepad++ or some other appropriate editor (maybe Paint or GIMP if it’s a picture), make sure SourceTree knows about the changes, and Commit+Push.

Note: if you rename a file or folder, it will typically show up in “Unstaged Changes” as 2 changes – a delete and an add – but then go to “Staged Changes” as a rename. It will also show up in the history as a rename once committed as long as it shows up in “Staged Changes” that way.

• Renames show up with a blue R box in SourceTree
• File additions show up with a green + box in SourceTree
• File deletions show up with a red - box in SourceTree

Syncing someone else’s GitHub.com-side changes into my computer’s copy

Now … what if I leave my computer alone for 5 months, but in the meantime, I edit some files directly through GitHub.com’s file-editing interface?

Or what if I’m collaborating with someone else who “pushed” changes to my GitHub.com repository while I was busy doing something else?

All the files on my hard drive are exactly as I left them on my hard drive 5 months ago. They don’t magically stay in sync with whatever’s on GitHub.com.

Seeing as I think of the repository hosted on GitHub.com as “the main copy” of my code, I don’t want to just ignore everything that’s going on there and blindly edit 5-month-old files on my computer.

If it’s been a while, I need to get a copy of GitHub.com’s present state downloaded to my computer – probably before I start making any changes on my own computer.

(How often I need to do this depends on whether I’m the only person who can edit the GitHub repository – if I am, I can safely know where I’m making my edits and keep on editing over and over again on my computer if I know I haven’t gone out and edited things directly on GitHub.com’s web interface in the meantime.)

To change my hard drive’s repository to be more like if I had freshly set it up in SourceTree from GitHub.com like I did at the start of this blog post, I would:

1. Close SourceTree
2. Open a cmd prompt (Windows key on my keyboard, type “cmd”, hit “enter”)
3. Type the command cd c:\example\GitRepos\VeryCoolRepositoryNumber1 and hit “enter”
4. Type the command git fetch --all and hit “enter”
   • If your computer complains that it doesn’t understand the command “git,” Google some tutorials about setting up your computer to understand calls to “git” from the command line. Git is already installed on your computer from when you installed SourceTree, so it’s probably just a question of configuring Windows’s “environment variables” / “PATH” to know that whenever you say “git” from a command prompt, you mean the “git.exe” file that SourceTree installed onto your hard drive in some folder somewhere.
     Mine lives at C:\Users\MYUSERNAMEONMYCOMPUTER\Documents\A_FOLDER_WHERE_I_SOMETIMES_INSTALL_SMALL_THINGS\Git\cmd\git.exe, which means I need C:\Users\MYUSERNAMEONMYCOMPUTER\Documents\A_FOLDER_WHERE_I_SOMETIMES_INSTALL_SMALL_THINGS\Git\cmd as part of my “PATH” “environment variable.”
     That’s a folder I created, so I think I must’ve installed command-line-only Git by hand long before I set up SourceTree, and I must’ve told SourceTree not to bother to install Git (and to use the copy I’d installed instead) when I installed SourceTree. It’s been years, though, so not sure. You will find “Git” in a different place on your computer.
     For starters, though, just try the command and see if it already works.
5. At the prompt that says, “Password for 'https://[email protected]':”, type my password to GitHub.com and hit “enter”
6. When it finishes, type the command git reset --hard origin/master and hit “enter”
7. If I see the note, “HEAD is now at SOME_CODE MOST_RECENT_COMMENT_FROM_GITHUB.COM_HISTORY”, I’m good to go!
8. Type the command exit and hit “enter”
9. Re-open SourceTree (or, if I forgot to close it, close it now and re-open it).
10. In SourceTree’s left navigation area, expand the “Branches” section, click “master,” and verify that to the right, towards the top, the change log history looks exactly like it does on the web at https://github.com/MYGITHUBUSERNAME/testprivaterepo/commits/master, and that nothing I had only done on my computer still exists.

I am now ready to start coding on my computer as if contributing to GitHub.com’s copy of the repository for the very first time!

As before, I can edit local copies of the files as I see fit, save them to my hard drive, and use SourceTree to double-check that I like the changes, “commit” notes about my changes to my local-computer-repository’s “version log,” and then “push” the changes and “version notes” out to GitHub.com.

Happy git-ing!