Guide to version control

There are many ways to contribute to an open source project. Since pydap is already hosted on Github, we recommend using Git for keeping track of changes and contribute to the project. There are many online tutorials for best practices for git, so we provide a summarized approach. We will assume that you have GitHub account and that you are signed in.

Using git and GitHub

Go to pydap and fork it. If you already have a fork, make sure your forked project is up-to-date with the remote project. If it is not, sync your fork.

Open your terminal. Set your GitHub username and ermail address using the following commands:

git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
git config --global user.name "Your Name"

Create a local clone of your fork as follows

git clone https://github.com/<your_username_here>/pydap.git

Move into your local clone directory and setup a remote that points to the original

cd pydap
git remote add upstream https://github.com/pydap/pydap
git fetch upstream/main

A great feature of git is the ability to work on branches when developing a project. A branch helps keep track of changes while keeping a local copy of the remote, unchanged code. To start a branch to making a contribution to pydap

git checkout -b <name_of_branch>

You are now on a branch and can safely make changes to your local clone. To stage them to become visible to other contributors, you need to push your branch to your forked project. To achieve that run

git push --set-upstream origin <name_of_branch>

You can now make changes, create commits and push them onto your forked project. To create a commit based on your local changes on your branch, run

git add .
git commit -m 'Minimal message describing changes'

This will create a milestone to revert back. When you are done with your changes, or want your collaborators to become aware of your work on your forked project, run

git push

You can go to your remote GitHub directory and find your changes.