CS 246 Assignment Submission Instructions
Prof. Richard Eisenberg
Spring 2017
All assignments in this course will be managed through GitHub, and you will be submitting your assignments there. There are three sets of instructions below. The first is for you to use on the first few assignments, before we have covered the intricacies of git. The second will work if you are working over ssh. The third is for after you have learned git well.
A note on git history: git allows you to save intermediate, utterly broken, terribly wrong, and otherwise embarrassing versions of your work. When you push your local repo to GitHub, all this dirty laundry goes with it. Do not succumb to the temptation to clean this away! Engineering is dirty work, filled with mistakes and silly notions. We all know this. So it’s OK for these intermediate steps to leak out. Yes, your final version should be polished, but that’s no reason not to also include your full git history.
To put my history where my mouth is, so to speak, my own repo for managing this course is all in public, with its full history, dead-ends, notes to self, and all.
gitAll assignments will have a “Click here to start assignment” link, which will lead you to an invitation to start the assignment. On this page, you will have to choose a team to be a part of. Because you can collaborate with up to 1 other student on assignments, all assignments are completed by “teams”. If your partner has already started the assignment, choose the team name from the list the appears. Otherwise (if you are working solo or if you are the first partner to start), create a new team name. Your choice of team name is not important – if you’re feeling particularly uncreative, you can just use your username. (Students working solo will be in a team with 1 member.)
Accepting the invitation will create a new repo on GitHub with the starter files for the assignment. It will be at https://github.com/bmc-cs246/hwX-zzz, where the Y is replaced by the homework number and zzz is replaced by the team name you choose when you accept the assignment. There will be a link to this repo from the page that comes up when you accept the assignment.
From your repo page, there should be a green button labeled “Clone or download” toward the top-right of the display. Click this and choose to download a zip file. On most computers, double-clicking the downloaded zip file will unpack its contents. You can then edit the files to complete the assignment.
When you are all with the assignment and ready to submit, you must complete two tasks: upload your files and create a pull request.
Upload your files: Navigate back to your assignment repo page (something like https://github.com/bmc-cs246/hwY-zzz). For every file you want to upload, navigate in your web browser to the directoy that file belongs in and then choose “Upload files” (a gray button two buttons to the left of that green one you used to download). You may upload multiple files (to the same folder) at the same time. After uploading, click on the filenames in your web browser and make sure that you see your edits.
Create a pull request: Click the “New pull request” button toward the left, above all the files. You will be brought to a “Compare changes” screen. Just a bit below the “Compare changes” title, there should be two pull-down menus, one labeled “base” and one labeled “compare”. In the base menu, choose pristine. After you make this selection, you should see your changes appear below on that same page, with the starter code on the left and your version on the right. This is the view I will be seeing and will grade.
If everything looks good, give a title to your submission (“hw2 submission” is just fine, but feel free to be creative here) and write any comments you want me to see while grading in the comment box. Click the green “Create pull request” button. You will get a pull request number (often, #1). When you see that, your assignment is submitted.
GitHub continues to track changes even after you create a pull request. So you can continue to upload files to the repo even after you create the pull request and the pull request is automatically updated. Thus there is no specific step you must take to resubmit.
git, but over sshIf you are working from home, on your own computer, but you wish to use gcc on Bryn Mawr’s server via ssh (see also this page, follow these instructions.
Follow the instructions below about registering an SSH key. Make sure to follow these instructions from Bryn Mawr’s server. That is, you should already be logged in before running, say, ssh-keygen.
As in the first two paragraphs above, accept the invitation for the assignment via the link in the assignment.
Then, navigate to your cs246 directory (you can make one if you don’t have one yet) and say git clone ssh://git@github.com/bmc-cs246/hw01.
When you are ready to submit, run these commands from the homework directory:
git add -u
git commit -m "Finished assignment"
git push
Then follow step (2) as above.
It’s the same as submitting, but you don’t need to make a new pull request. (That is, you do git add -u, git commit ..., and git push, but you don’t need to do anything else.)
gitBefore pushing your local repo to GitHub will work, you need to register your SSH (Secure SHell) key with GitHub.
~/.ssh directory, you don’t have an SSH key. Go to step (c).~/.ssh directory, go there. See if you have an id_rsa.pub file. If you do, you have an SSH key and can proceed to register it with GitHub. Otherwise, go to step (c).You will have to register a key separately from each computer you will push repos from.
As in the first two paragraphs above, accept the invitation for the assignment via the link in the assignment.
Then, you can clone the repo with git clone ssh://git@github.com/bmc-cs246/hwY-zzz where hwY-zzz is the name of your repo. Edit files and commit to your heart’s content. You can even git push before your down to create a backup copy of your work.
git push. This should copy all your edited files onto GitHub.
Follow step (2) above.
git push