Submitting a Pull Request for Lessons

Lessons should be submitted as a Pull Request (PR) at least one full day before the session. Submitting the lessons as a Pull Request is also a great way to find out whether your lesson matches what is advertised in the Events repo. New lessons should be created from a copy of the lessons/template/lesson.md file. Follow the details and requests in the template lesson file and write up your lesson!

Please follow the instructions below before submitting your PR:

Brief step-by-step

  1. Fork the studyGroup repo
  2. (Optional) git clone your forked version onto your computer
  3. Use the lesson template and make your lesson
  4. Follow the file/folder naming rules (see below)
  5. git add and git commit that lesson
  6. git push your lesson to your forked studyGroup repo
  7. Submit a PR using Github’s Pull Request button on your forked version

Detailed step-by-step

  1. Fork the studyGroup into your GitHub account. See this GitHub help for info on forking.
  2. After it is forked, git clone from your terminal or Git Bash of your new forked version of studyGroup onto your computer from your account. If you want it on your Desktop do: 
      cd Desktop
  git clone https://github.com/YOUR-USERNAME/studyGroup.git

…replacing YOUR-USERNAME with your own user name on GitHub (eg: mine would look like git clone https://github.com/lwjohnst86/studyGroup.git).

  1. Type ls to confirm that the studyGroup folder was created. Then cd studyGroup and git status or git log to confirm that you are now in the new repo.
  2. Add the original Study Group repo using this command: 
      git remote add upstream https://github.com/UofTCoders/studyGroup.git
  git fetch upstream
  3. Create a new folder in the lessons folder of studyGroup on your computer, naming it appropriately (without spaces) to the lesson you are planning on teaching. Files and folders should be named as such:
    • Create the lesson template under whichever programming language you are teaching (e.g. under lesson/r or lesson/python.). Use the misc/ folder if you aren’t sure.
    • Name the new lesson folder, all small caps, so that it simply explains what the topic is (e.g. python/intro/, r/loops/).
    • If you need more than one word, keep all small caps and use a dash (-) for a space (e.g. misc/bash-intro/, misc/jekyll-ghpages/).

  4. Copy the lessons/template/lesson.md into the new folder and write up your lesson in there, filling out requested information. This is a Markdown file (.md). The reason it should be Markdown or plain text is because GitHub renders the Markdown file into HTML so it’s nicer to read on the site and for others.

  5. Save the new file in the git history: 
      git add ./lessons/yourlesson/lesson.md
  git commit -m "Added file on lesson"
  6. Push up to your GitHub repo: 
      git push origin gh-pages
  7. Submit a Pull Request from your GitHub account into the UofTCoders. Make sure the base fork is set to UofTCoders/studyGroup (and not mozillascience/studyGroup). Check the GitHub help on Pull Requests.

Note: For those wanting to contribute regularly or who edit their repositories often, it’s best to create a new branch for each PR you make. For example, if you want to clean up some bits of the repo, you can follow a workflow such as this:

## Good to name the branch to reflect what you are doing.
git checkout -b cleaningUp
## Make edits/changes/cleaning up
git add files-changed
git commit
git push origin cleaningUp

You can now make a pull request of the cleaningUp branch. Once the pull request has been completed, you can delete the now old branch via:

git checkout gh-pages ## Move back to main branch
git branch --delete cleaningUp
## If you want to delete the remote branch too do:
git push origin --delete cleaningUp
## Update your main branch from the new upstream branch
git pull upstream gh-pages