Putting It All Together

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 0 min

Questions

• What does a typical Git workflow look like?

Objectives

• Walk through a typical Git workflow with concepts learned in previous sections.

Now let’s see how all of the concepts described in previous sections cohere with a brief analogy:

Josh and Sarah are scientists that were working on a joint project. When the time came to write a paper for the project, Josh wrote a first sketch and opened a repository named Nobel-Prize-Paper within the ZuckermanBrain GitHub organization. They split the writing work between each other- Sarah would write the introduction and discussion sections while Josh would write the methods and results sections.

Sarah opened a sarah-part branch and Josh opened a josh-part branch. They cloned the branches to their local computers and worked. From time to time, they added (by staging) and committed their work to their local branches. Each time they felt that one of the paragraphs got to a reasonable level of completeness they pushed it into their remote branch. After a while Sarah and Josh merged their branches into the remote master branch and deleted the josh-part and sarah-part branches.

They then had the first full version of the paper but it needed to be improved. Sarah created a sarah-version branch and Josh made a josh-version branch. Each of them worked on the entire paper to fine tune their draft. Josh merged his branch first and therefore had no conflicts with the current master version. When Sarah tried to merge, she found out that she needed to pull from master and resolve the conflicts before merging her version.

Afterwards, since there were just small changes to be made to the paper Sarah and Josh worked directly on the master branch. Each of them switched to the master branch on their local repository. Now before pushing their commits they needed to pull from the master branch and resolve conflicts if they existed.

Lea is an outside colleague who is on friendly terms with Josh and Sarah. Because of this, they sent the paper to Lea to go over (and be acknowledged in the paper) she worked on her own branch and opened pull request for the changes she offered. When everyone was happy with the version they tagged it with the name Nature-Submission, exported a PDF with pandoc, and submitted it to Nature.

The operations for a typical Git workflow are illustrated as follows:

Key Points

• The concepts described in previous sections all contribute to a typical version control workflow.