Development Environment Set Up: Git

Due Friday before class

Objective

to get your development environment set up for future classwork

Part 0: Choose Your Text Editor

You'll use a simple text editor to write Java programs. A text editor is for writing plain text documents, i.e., no different fonts, formats, etc. (We'll use an IDE later.) You will also use a text editor to write your commit messages in git (see below). The text editor you use for each task does not need to be the same.

Some options: emacs, vim, Pulsar (a fork of Atom), jEdit (written in Java), Notepad, VSCode (but this adds a GUI interface for git that you shouldn't use yet). Play around and see what you like.

Part 1: Install and Set Up Git

You'll learn more about git soon, but for now, know that git is a commonly used version control system that we'll use this term.

• If you plan to use only the lab machines, you can skip this step. On Mac or Linux, Git may already be installed. Follow the instructions here: Download and install Git
  On Windows, there are some settings you should set to work well with other platforms and it comes with a program called Git Shell that you can use to enter the commands below (you can also install a Linux on Windows with WSL!)
• Within your terminal/shell, configure Git for your computer (note, these commands only need to be done once for each computer you want to use git on). Replace the information as appropriate.
  git config --global user.name "YOUR NAME"
git config --global user.email "YOURUSERID@mail.wlu.edu"

  I will use the terms terminal and shell interchangeably.

• When commiting, git automatically opens an editor to write/save the commit messages. It seems that most systems are defaulting to using vim for the editor, which many of you probably don't know and it has a learning curve--but you definitely can learn it. It is popular with developers, and there are a bunch of tutorials and resources. You can even play a game to learn vim (after consulting the other resources first). If you want to change the editor that is used for git, see these examples. Beyond those examples, you can probably find examples for other text editors, e.g., for Pulsar.

Part 2: Creating and Setting Up Your GitHub Account

Get a GitHub account if you don't have one already.

Set up Your GitHub Account: Personal Access Token (classic)

Create a personal access token (classic) in the GitHub web interface.

• You can set the expiration to be the end of the term or to never expire.
• Set the scopes to all of repo.
• Save your token somewhere! You can't retrieve it again after it has been generated. You can create a new one, though.

GitHub is encouraging use of their new fine-grained access tokens, which are more secure. However, they are still in beta and not supported by all of GitHub's tools yet, and GitHub hasn't made them quite as easy/intuitive to use. We may use these later in the semester, but, for now, let's stick with the classic ones.

Student Developer Pack (Optional)

You may have seen the ad for the Student Developer Pack. Check it out and sign up if you're interested.

Submitting your assignment

No submission. This is just on your honor that you do it, so that you're prepared for future work.