Viewing a Course Repository

The course repository is located in a private organizational account in the GitHub cloud. This means that it can only be viewed by invited GitHub users, i.e., students in the class. During the initial weeks of the course you will only be reading and "pulling" from the GitHub course repository. As we move into the project phase you will start to add content to your GitHub repository.

Github account

By now you should have done these things:

1. Signed up for an account on Github
2. Sent me your Github user name
3. Accepted my invitation to join the folchcourses Github organization
4. Installed Git for Windows (Windows) or GitHub Desktop (Mac) on your personal machine

If you have not done all of these, follow the steps here.

Viewing the course repository online

In what follows we will be using the example of a student named Joe Johnson, with the Github user name of geonole. You should replace this with your GitHub user name in the steps that follow.

1. Login to Github
2. Click your user icon in the upper-right corner. example
3. Update your profile. example
4. Click the folchcourses icon in the lower-left corner. example
5. Click the repository with your course name, semester and year. example
6. Here you will find the syllabus, exercises and other course content. example

Cloning the course repository to your local hard drive

Cloning allows you to pull course content from the cloud (hosted at github.com) to your personal computer. The cloning process will create a special directory on your computer that synchronizes the files in the cloud and the files on your computer. Unlike Dropbox, you explicitly control when a synchronization happens using the Git software. Follow these steps to get this setup on your computer. Note: you only need do this the first time you connect to a remote repository.

1. Create a new directory on your hard drive where you want to keep the course materials from GitHub.
2. Open Terminal (Mac) or Anaconda Prompt (Windows).
3. Use the cd command to navigate to the new directory you just created. For example, if you have a directory called python_class in your Documents directory then type:
   • cd Documents
   • cd python_class
4. Get course repository
• Go to the course webpage on GitHub > Click the "Clone or download" link (green button in the upper-right) > Highlight the entire URL it shows and copy it.
• Go to the command line. Type git clone and then paste the URL you just copied. It should look something like this:
  git clone https://github.com/folchcourses/geo5934_fall2015.git
  If it looks good, hit enter.
• Enter your GitHub user name and password if asked.
• If all went well, you can view the current course files on your hard drive in Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows).

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