Version Control (feat. SSH)

  1. GitHub
  2. Repository SSH Access

 

 

The last thing to discuss before we actually get to do something in Rails is version control. This might seem largely unnecessary within the remit of learning how to code with Rails, but using it while learning the rest of this stuff will pay off when you start writing your own apps without the help of this wonderful guide. When we come to deploy our app later on, you will also be glad you did this from the start!

While other version control systems are available, this guide will focus on using git and its companion repository store, GitHub. Git does all the tricky bits of version control for you, so all you have to do is make sure you are pointing at the correct repo(sitory) and the right branch, and that you actually push your work to the repo! Git supports a number of repository stores, my particular favorite being GitHub which gives you unlimited free public repositories (and unlimited private ones for a very reasonable monthly fee).

To get started, head over to GitHub and set up your free account (will require email verification).

GitHub Home

Once complete, hit the + sign on the top-right of the interface and create a new repository with a name of your choosing.

GitHub New Repo

Once done, this will give you a page of instructions on how to initialise a repo and push it to GitHub, which we will go through later.

 

 

In order to push our files, we will need to set up SSH access to the machine we will be developing on. GitHub will soon be removing the ability to authenticate yourself using your account login credentials, so it makes sense to start as we will have to go on. If you are using an online IDE or a Google-hosted VM then SSH access should already be set up for you - if not, you only need to install an SSH client and generate a key: 

$ sudo apt install openssh-client          ## install the client
$ ssh-keygen -t rsa                        ## generate your key
## Just hit enter until you get your beautiful randomart image

With our SSH key generated, either by the host or by us, we can run the following to show our public SSH key: 

$ cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

And now we just paste this key into the Key Settings in your GitHub account settings under New SSH key, giving it a snappy title.
With this, we are ready to push our app to GitHub securely and easily. But first we need to build the app!

 
 

< Dev Environment Setup | [ToDoList] Building the App >
Back

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

[ToDoList] Basic Pages

Image
Well that was fun. However all we’ve really done is spooked someone called Bob, without actually creating anything remotely resembling a web application. Let’s rectify this and create some pages one would normally find on a website; a Home page and an About page. Home & Away About Helpful Links [Insert Beatles Reference]     Because we already learned a bit about MVC, we know that we will need a controller and at least one view to display these pages (we won’t need to worry about models until we’re handling real data). As before, we’ll need to add a route configuration so Rails knows where to go, too. Rails provides a fair bit of magic to streamline this process in the form of generators . However, because we’re learning, we’re going to do this manually for now and learn what this magic entails, so we can appreciate it more later. We already created a PagesController in the...
Read more

New Rails Apps with Docker Compose

Image
Following on from the Docker & docker-compose guides, it is possible to use docker-compose to build a Rails application that uses a PostgreSQL database without even installing Ruby on your local machine by instead using containers ! This becomes a very useful option to have if you work from many different workstations and don't want to ensure they are all equipped with the correct Ruby and Rails dependencies, or if you wish to use a version of Ruby / Rails not supported by your operating system (for example, Ubuntu 20.04 only allows provides up to Ruby 2.7 in its apt cache). In fact, Rails 7 added native support for Docker, such that it generates almost all of the default files we need for us! This comes with its problems and, I won't lie, updating this post to work with Rails 7 (it was previously written for Rails 6) has been a colossal pain and features a bit of hackery. However it is ultimately a good thing, and having ...
Read more

[ToDoList] Building the App

Image
The new Generator The Rails Development Server     So we have now learned some theory about Rails and set up our development environment with the required packages and version control prerequisites. I think that’s enough preamble, let’s get developing! The next few sections will involve creating a funky little web app that contains a To-Do list that we can add, remove and edit entries from. We saw a very small snippet of the extensive file structure that Rails uses in the first section. If you thought you’d be constructing the longest mkdir -p command in the observable universe to get all of this set up, you will be pleased to know (as I was) that our first utilisation of Rails magic will be to get Rails to generate all of this for us! Feel free to set up a projects directory on your dev machine, or you can just use your home dir if you’d prefer. Whatever you choose, change into this dir n...
Read more