New Member Intro

This is a quick intro page for new members to get started with GitHub to work on the Robotics code. GitHub has many help and resource pages which you should take full advantage of.

SSH Key Exchange

Exchanging SSH keys makes working with GitHub easier. Make sure to only do this from your own computer!

First, generate yourself an SSH public/private key. After following those instructions, add the public key in your account settings. This tells GitHub who you are when you use this ssh key.

If you have multiple computers, you can copy the public/private key to other computers. You can also enter a passphrase when generating the SSH key. If you use a passphrase, then every time you do a network operation, it will ask for the passphrase instead of your password. This is nice, because if someone steals your computer, at least they won't be able to ruin your GitHub account. You can just invalidate the SSH key while still using the same password for your account.

Forking the Project

For those who don't know, "forking" a project is making an exact duplicate of the project. The command git clone does this automatically. When working on the code base, you'll be making modifications to your own project. After you think you're done making any changes on your local computer, you push the changes to your own project on GitHub. You then issue a "pull request" to the original project. At that point, one of the project maintainers will verify the change and merge it into the main code base.