GitHub repositories usually have the following workflow and purpose :- There is code on an online repository, other users duplicate (or “fork”) the repositories to their own account, make changes and then try to have the changes pushed back into the original main codebase. Meanwhile, the original repository owner continues to work on his code while you add your proposed features.

So the first thing you need to think of is that your GitHub repository is something independent of your local machine. You write, test, and execute your software on your local system but while you are doing this, your online main repository maintains its own independent state until you decide that you’re going to update your changes, also known as pushing code.

Keeping this in mind, I’ll quickly work you through some steps. On your browser, open up this url, it’s a toy repo I made on my GitHub account. On the top right corner you’ll see a button with a sort of rotated “share” symbol called Fork. Hit this button.

Within a few seconds, you’ll be taken to the URL https://github.com/your_username/github-tutorial , and voila, you’ve forked a copy of my repository and now it is technically yours to do whatever you want with within its license. (From here on, you would follow similar steps for repositories that you have created)

But we’d like to modifiy this repo, and the online browser editor way is much too tedious and has no way of executing code. Open up a non messy folder on your system and type in the following

git clone https://github.com/your_username/github-tutorial

This creates the folder github-tutorial which you can just cd into.

Now open up the file init.py and follow the instructions mentioned. (Just wrap the cute alien kitty around with comments and you’re good to go!)

Now save the file, and type the following

git status

Changes not staged for commit:
  (use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
  (use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)

	modified:   init.py

So now git has detected a change in your working directory. (In general, all changes and additions and deletions will be detected and you can add any of them to your commit list by typying git add . If you’d just like to commit all the changes in your entire working directory, use git commit --all)

Go ahead and type git add init.py

Now type git status again and you’ll notice that the red line is showing up in green. Any modifications not added would still show up in red however, thus allowing you to choose what changes to assign to which commit in what sequence. Use git add folder/* to add entire folders but be careful, because very often you’d have files that you don’t want to add (like platform dependent object files or db dumps that show up as you code)

Finally, with our changes done, we commit the change with the following :-

git commit -m "Wrapped kitty with comments"

A commit basically states that you’re offering the changes you’ve made in the commit list officially to the repo and that it is now under the license of the repo. (Unless you’re releasing a ton of software and collaborations, this point isn’t very important right now) The -m flag is used to attach a message to the commit, to help future maintainers understand the changes that were made in that commit.

And that’s it, you’ve successfuly updated your local repository with your change. It is now in theory a fully shippable module right until this last commit, however it is just a local state that you need to push to your online repository

git push origin

You’ll be prompted to enter your login details and after a few seconds, congratulations, you have pushed your commits to the online repository of your fork of my repository. To quickly revise, whenever you work on your code, all of it has to be commited using git commit to count as part of the repository. To do this, a non zero number of changes must be added using git add . It is always a good idea to use a brief meaningful meassage for git commit. Finally, to reflect the changes on the GitHub repository, use git push origin . You can now check the repository on your repo and see that that the number of commits has changed. If you dash to my repo, you’ll notice that it remains in its original state, with the alien kitty jamming all the possible code executions.

That’s it for now, thank you for reading.