Summary and Setup

Prerequisite

Prerequisites

  • Basic familiarity with Git and GitHub (see our introductory course)
  • A working local installation of Git
  • A local copy of the recipe repository
  • Complete the Setup before starting

About the RSE team

Your instructors are part of Imperial’s central Research Software Engineering (RSE) team, whose role is to improve the quality, impact and sustainability of research software. While most of our work is as hired coders and consultants on research projects, we also offer a number of free services, including training courses such as this one and one-to-one code surgeries, where you can get advice and support with software development.

You can find more information about our work and the services we offer on our website.

Prerequisite

Minimum requirements

Completing this course requires:

  • Access to a computer with Git installed
  • A GitHub account
  • A configured recipe repository
  • Be comfortable with using Git

This course is currently being delivered in person and remotely so please make sure you have access to a suitable computer.

Configure your recipe repository

If you have completed our Introduction to using Git and GitHub for software development course, you should have a recipe repository in your GitHub account that will be used in this course. Specifically, in the lesson on Committing and History from the Introduction course, we discuss how to set up the recipe repository. Make sure you have a clone of that repo in your local home directory.

If you have not completed the intro course:

  • Download this zip archive that contains the recipe repo with some previous commit history that will be used in the session.
  • Extract it into your home directory.
  • Create a repository on your personal GitHub account and set it as the remote for this recipe repository you have locally.
Callout

Important

If you do not know how to set up a remote repo on GitHub, you can follow the steps in the “Configuring a remote repository from a local one” exercise in this lesson from intro course

Install Git

Callout

Important

If you do not already have Git installed or are not comfortable with using it for simple version control tasks, you should consider attending our Introduction to using Git and GitHub for software development course first.

Please follow the relevant instructions depending on your operating system.

Configure Git to use your preferred text editor

Many Git commands require you to provide input via a text editor (though you can often skip this step with additional command-line arguments). For example, running git commit by itself will open a text editor to allow you to enter a commit message. Depending on your OS and how you installed Git, the text editor Git will use can be any number of things, but is likely to be either nano or vim, which are both terminal-based editors. It is best to configure your preferred editor explicitly (if you are using editor for the first time, it is advisable to use nano).

To view the currently configured text editor, you can run:

BASH 

git config --global core.editor

(The output may be empty, indicating that no editor has been selected.)

If you would prefer to use a graphical text editor, there is useful documentation on GitHub on how to do this for some common editors.

If you would rather just use nano, you can run:

BASH 

git config --global core.editor nano