14  Pushing to Github

🎯 Goal: By the end of this chapter, you’ll know how to connect your Git project to Github and push your first commit.

Now that your project changes have been committed locally on your computer, let’s put it on GitHub so you can back it up and collaborate with others.

14.1 Create a Repository on GitHub

First things first, we need to actually make a place for our project on Github. In Github, this is called a repository. Think of a repository (or repo for short) like making a new folder in Google Drive where you’d save all your interview notes, research and drafts when working on a story.

To make new Github repository:

  1. Go to github.com and log in.

  2. Click the + in toolbar at the upper right corner. Then click “New repository” in the dropdown.

  3. Do the following in the Create a new repository form:

    1. Fill in the Repository name field, using the same name as your project folder (e.g. my-quarto-project)

    2. Leave Description blank for now

    3. Leave the box unchecked that says “Initialize this repository with a README” (We can add this on our own later)

    4. Leave the other defaults as-is (None gitignore and None for licence)

  4. Click Create repository.

    You’ll now see a page with instructions on how to connect your local folder to this GitHub repository.

  5. In the Quick setup box

    1. Click the SSH tab to get the correct URL to clone (it will begin with git@ instead of https:)
    2. Click the copy icon button next to the “SSH URL” box to copy the URL to your clipboard

This URL is the “address” where your repository lives. We’ll use it to connect our local Git project to our Github project in the next step.

14.2 Connect your local Git project to GitHub

We’re now ready to hook up local project to our Github project. We’ll only have to do this once, but it involves a couple steps

First, we’ll add our remote project by doing the following:

  1. Navigate to the Terminal tab inside your RStudio Quarto project.

  2. Type the following command, but replace the URL with the one you copied from GitHub:

    git remote add origin git@github.com:your-name/your-repo-name.git

  3. Run the command by hitting Enter / return.

Now, we’ll add our saved snapshot of our files to Github by pushing our changes:

  1. Run the following:

    git push -u origin main

14.3 Quick Recap: what do these commands do?

Ok, we just did a lot there. Let’s pause for a moment and breakdown everything we just did:

  • git remote add origin {REPO_URL}: Told Git where your online repository lives (on GitHub).

  • git push -u origin main

    This command did two things:

    1. Setup a link between your local main branch and the main branch on GitHub.
    2. “Pushed” your local commits (aka the “snapshot” we took last section) to GitHub.

In short, these steps connected your local project to your remote project on Github, then saved the snapshot you took to the cloud. We won’t have to repeat these exact steps ever again when saving snapshots in the future for this project.

That said, is the process you will follow when making new Github projects in the future, so make sure you understand the basics of what we did here.

🎉 Congratulations: you now have your first live project is on GitHub!

14.4 📝 Mini exercise: explore Your GitHub project

Go to your repository page on GitHub (or refresh the page if you still have it open from before).

You should see all your project files, including .qmd, .gitignore, etc.

Pay attention to what’s showing in the file list. You’ll see some helpful information about the project, including:

  1. Which user made the most recent commit
  2. The commit message
  3. The commit number
  4. The timestamp of the commit In the file list
  5. The commit message and timestamp from the most recent update made to each file or folder.

Take a few minutes to click on some of your files and get familiar with the Github interface.

Note

Not every file will update with each git push. Git only keeps track of changes to files. If you made no edits to a file in a commit, it won’t change. Timestamps will help you track when updates were last made different parts of your project!

14.5 🎯 Checkpoint

At this point in the guide, you’ve learned how to:

  • Create a new RStudio project.
  • Turn on Git tracking with git init.
  • Tell Git to ignore files (.gitignore).
  • Stage and commit changes to Git (git add and git commit).
  • Connect your local project to your remote GitHub repository (git remote add origin).
  • Push your first commit to Github (git push).

Next up:

We’ll learn how to make changes, track versions, and collaborate like pros.