To be able to submit your assignments, you need to go through the following steps:

1. If you don't have a GitHub account, create one.

2. Register your GitHub username with this course by filling out this form. This is due on Friday, 15 July -- you will not be able to submit any assignments if this is not done.

3. On your local machine, create a repository that you will be using for your COMS2001 assignments -- the name of the repository doesn't matter. Create a file README.md in a subdirectory called hw0 of that repository and commit it.

4. Once notified that your private repository for this course has been created, link your local repository to your private GitHub repository for this course and push to GitHub.

5. You are now ready to work on your first assignment.

To be able effectively work on your assignments and submit them, you need to learn to use both git and GitHub.

git is a version control tool that helps you to keep track of different versions of your files and synchronize them across different machines. GitHub is a hosting service for git repositories with a convenient web interface.

It is worth your while to invest time and effort in learning how to use git and GitHub effectively -- you will be using them throughout this course, and possibly for a very long time afterwards. A good place to start learning about them is this book. Additional resources are suggested at the course's web-page. GitHub's help page also contains numerous links to resources for learning about both git and GitHub.

If you don't yet have a GitHub account, create one by following the instructions here.

Once you have an account, register it with this course by filling out this form. After you've registered your account, you will receive an email message with a link to your personal GitHub repository for this course; this email will be sent to the email address associated with your GitHub account.

Before you can fetch/pull repositories from or push repositories to GitHub from a local machine on Wits campus, you will have to set up git to by-pass the university proxy server. To do that, execute the following command:

git config --global https.proxy "http://students\student_number:[email protected]:80"

All assignments will be submitted by pushing to your private repository associated with this course.

For the duration of the course, you will have access to two homework-related repositories in the WITS-2001 GitHub organization:

1. A homework repository containing public information about the homework assignments. You only have the read access to this repository. All the assignments and updates will be posted here. You should regularly check the course's web-site and Wit-e for announcements related to homework assignments.

2. A personal repository whose name will coincide with your student number. This repository is private to you -- only you and the course staff can read from this repository: you should keep the contents of this repository private and secure. You will be using this repository to submit your assignments.

Each assignment will reside in a separate top-level directory. Each assignment has a README.md containing instructions as well as the files you are going to need to complete the assignment. Right now, you are reading a README.md for hw.

At the start of the course, your personal repository will be empty.

In this section, we are going to suggest a workflow for completing your assignments; if you find an alternative workflow more convenient, you are welcome to use it.

We suggest that you create a repository on your local machine and link it up with both of your remote repositories for this course; you might want to tag the public repository containing the assignments as "course" and your private repository as "origin". Assuming you have adopted this naming convention, before starting work on your assignment, you will pull (or fetch and merge) from course into your local repository, and once you've completed your work, you will push it to origin. To make pulling from course easier, you might want to set up a branch in your local repository that tracks course/master.

Working out the details of how the tasks described in the preceding paragraph are done is left to you as part your first assignment. Your are welcome to seek help on this both from your fellow students and from the course staff. A brief presentation on using git and GitHub will be given at the first lab.