My first commit to an Open Source Project: Django
Last September the annual Django Con was held in San Diego. I really wanted to go, but because of other projects and conferences for my job, I wasn’t able to make it.
The next best thing to to watch the videos from DjangoCon on YouTube. I watched a couple of the videos, but one that really caught my attention was by Carlton Gibson titled “Your Web Framework Needs You: An Update by Carlton Gibson”.
I took what Carlton said to heart and thought, I really should be able to do something to help.
I went to the Django Issues site and searched for an Easy Pickings issue that involved documentation and found issue 31006 “Document how to escape a date/time format character for the |date and |time filters.”
I read the steps on what I needed to do to submit a pull request, but since it was my first time ever participating like this … I was a bit lost.
Luckily there isn’t anything that you can break, so I was able to wonder around for a bit and get my bearings.
I forked the GitHub repo and I cloned it locally.
I then spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out where the change was going to need to be made, and exactly what needed to change.
Finally, with my changes made, I pushed my code changes to GitHub and waited.
Within a few hours Mariusz Felisiak replied back and asked about a suggestion he had made (but which I missed). I dug back into the documentation, found what he was referring to, and made (what I thought) was his suggested change.
Another push and a bit more waiting.
Mariusz Felisiak replied back with some input about the change I pushed up, and I realized I had missed the mark on what he was suggesting.
OK. Third time’s a charm, right?
Turns out, in this case it was. I pushed up one last time and this time, my changes were merged into the master and just like that, I am now a contributor to Django (albeit a very, very, very minor contributor).
Overall, this was a great experience, both with respect to learning about contributing to an open source project, as well as learning about GitHub.
I’m hoping that with the holidays upon us I’ll be able to find the time to pick up one or two (maybe even three) Easy Pickings issues from the Django issue tracker.
Adding my Raspberry Pi Project code to GitHub
Over the long holiday weekend I had the opportunity to play around a bit with some of my Raspberry Pi scripts and try to do some fine tuning.
I mostly failed in getting anything to run better, but I did discover that not having my code in version control was a bad idea. (Duh)
I spent the better part of an hour trying to find a script that I had accidentally deleted somewhere in my blog. Turns out it was (mostly) there, but it didn’t ‘feel’ right … though I’m not sure why.
I was able to restore the file from my blog archive, but I decided that was a dumb way to live and given that
- I use version control at work (and have for the last 15 years)
- I’ve used it for other personal projects
However, I’ve only ever used a GUI version of either subversion (at work) or GitHub (for personal projects via PyCharm). I’ve never used it from the command line.
And so, with a bit of time on my hands I dove in to see what needed to be done.
Turns out, not much. I used this GitHub resource to get me what I needed. Only a couple of commands and I was in business.
The problem is that I have a terrible memory and this isn’t something I’m going to do very often. So, I decided to write a bash script to encapsulate all of the commands and help me out a bit.
The script looks like this:
echo "Enter your commit message:"
read commit_msg
git commit -m "$commit_msg"
git remote add origin path/to/repository
git remote -v
git push -u origin master
git add $1
echo ”enter your commit message:”
read commit_msg
git commit -m ”$commit_msg”
git push
I just recently learned about user input in bash scripts and was really excited about the opportunity to be able to use it. Turns out it didn’t take long to try it out! (God I love learning things!)
What the script does is commits the files that have been changed (all of them), adds it to the origin on the GitHub repo that has been specified, prints verbose logging to the screen (so I can tell what I’ve messed up if it happens) and then pushes the changes to the master.
This script doesn’t allow you to specify what files to commit, nor does it allow for branching and tagging … but I don’t need those (yet).
I added this script to 3 of my projects, each of which can be found in the following GitHub Repos:
I had to make the commit.sh executable (with chmod +x commit.sh) but other than that it’s basically plug and play.
Addendum
I made a change to my Kings script tonight (Nov 27) and it wouldn’t get pushed to git. After a bit of Googling and playing around, I determined that the original script would only push changes to an empty repo ... not one with stuff, like I had. Changes made to the post (and the GitHub repo!)
Pushing Changes from Pythonista to GitHub - Step 1
With the most recent release of the iOS app Workflow I was toying with the idea of writing a workflow that would allow me to update / add a file to a GitHub repo via a workflow.
My thinking was that since Pythonista is only running local files on my iPad if I could use a workflow to access the api elements to push the changes to my repo that would be pretty sweet.
In order to get this to work I'd need to be able to accomplosh the following things (not necessarily in this order)
- Have the workflow get a list of all of the repositories in my GitHub
- Get the current contents of the app to the clip board
- Commit the changes to the master of the repo
I have been able to write a Workflow that will get all of the public repos of a specified github user. Pretty straight forward stuff.
The next thing I'm working on getting is to be able to commit the changes from the clip board to a specific file in the repo (if one is specified) otherwise a new file would be created.
I really just want to 'have the answer' for this, but I know that the journey will be the best part of getting this project completed.
So for now, I continue to read the GitHub API Documentation to discover exactly how to do what I want to do.