Working with git and github

This document will provide a brief overview of working with the Joomla Platform repository on github.com for people who are interested in making code contributions and using eclipse as an IDE. Much will also apply for people who just want to follow development, but that is much simpler.

Some preliminary information.

What is Git?

Git is distributed version control software. Such software (another example is Mercurial while subversion and CVS are non distributed version control systems) allow many people to contribute code to a single project and also allow for well defined tracking of code changes and provide mechanisms for recording commit by commit records of changes.

What is Github?

Github is a host for git repositories. It is located at github.com

What is the Joomla! Platform?

The Joomla! Platform also known as the Joomla! Framework is the set of libraries that are used to build the Joomla! CMS and other applications.

The platform is managed separately from the CMS and has its own release cycle; each release of the CMS uses one specific version of the platform.

The platform repository is located at: github.com/joomla/joomla-platform

First steps: Github account

First, you will need to register at git hub.

Once registered, you will probably want to go to github.com/joomla/joomla-platform and click follow. Then whenever you log in you will see the latest things that have happened in the repository.

If you are going to code, you will also want to click on fork. This will give you your own copy of the platform to work with. You'll probably want to follow that too.

Second steps: Install git

Now you will want to install git on your local workstation. Github provides excellent instructions on how to do this that will detect your operating system. Simply click on the Set Up Git button.

You will need to set up SSH. As it says on the Github instructions " Setting them up is fairly easy, but does involve a number of steps." Some will be specific to you operating system, so follow the instructions at github.

You will also need to tell git your user name and password so that it can connect to your repositories on github.

Third steps

Command Line

If you like using the command line, git by itself provides commands to create a local copy of your fork at github. There are a number of tutorials and reference sites for git including:

• git-scm.com/documentation
• gitimmersion

Github itself has many documents about how to use git on its help site

• help.github.com/

Eclipse

Git can also be used with Eclipse, a popular integrated development environment (IDE).