The GitHub Blog: Watercooler

Many users are claiming coolness boosts of 90% – 100% after installing Dr Nic’s GitHub Badge on their blog. I should know — I’m one of them. Just look at my badge:

Cool, right? Check out the good Doctor’s blog post and have at.

Tim Dysinger has a great guide on Deploying with Capistrano, Git and SSH-Agent. Check it out to learn how to deploy your web app without needing deploy keys.

New from Peepcode, Scott Chacon’s Git Internals PDF is sure to be a hit. If you’re wondering the ins and outs of Git, beyond the porcelain commands, this PDF is for you.

It also covers Git day-to-day use, workflow, and best practices. Even if you’re comfortable with Git, you’ll surely pick something up in this.

No, we’re not listed on the NASDAQ (yet), but we are open-sourcing the code that handles our service integration with the likes of Twitter, Campfire, Lighthouse, etc.

We realized there’s no way our small team can keep up with the demand, so rather than limiting the number of choices, we’ve decided to let the community pitch in if you guys and gals are interested in adding or modifying a service.

Head to the following repository for instructions on how to help:

https://github.com/github/github-services

Looks like jakobo had some hard drive troubles this weekend. Ouch. Luckily, thanks to backups and GitHub, he didn’t lose much.

I did a fresh install upgrade from Tiger to Leopard last weekend. With GMail, 1password, and GitHub, I didn’t worry that much about losing anything critical in the move. Really, there’s nothing keeping you from using GitHub in tandem with other git repository hosts. That’s kind of the point.

Distribute your data and you will have a much harder time losing it. Just ask jakobo.

Update regarding require, please read below

The next time you visit your repository’s edit screen you’ll see a new checkbox that should be pretty exciting for users hosting their RubyGem project on GitHub:

After checking that, managing your gem is as simple as managing a gemspec in your project’s root directory (example). Anytime you push a modified gemspec to GitHub, we’ll build and publish a new gem for you.

Feel free to give your open source friends a hard time when they don’t release a new gem version for a while, because they have no excuse now :-)

One concept regarding our server that bears repeating is that your gem will always be prefixed with your username. Installing mojombo’s grit gem is done via the following:

$ sudo gem install mojombo-grit
Successfully installed mojombo-grit-0.8.1

Using said gem works a couple of ways. First the regular require:

$ irb -rubygems
>> require 'grit'
=> true

Update: The following also works if you have competing versions of the same gem:

$ irb -rubygems
>> gem 'mojombo-grit'
=> true
>> require 'grit'
=> true

The namespacing may feel awkward as first, but it really lends itself to the distributed nature of the service we provide. Forking a RubyGem project shouldn’t be any more complicated than forking any other type of project.

Visit http://gems.github.com for all of the details. Enjoy!

GitHub hit a major milestone the other day, surpassing its millionth event. Events are those helpful things that show up in your dashboard, letting you know when someone makes a comment, forks a repository, is added as a member to another, and so on.

Thanks to everyone, old and new, for making this site a pleasure to work on. We have some really exciting stuff in the pipeline, so stick around!

…is coming soon. But we need your help!

Please send us any Git or GitHub related questions so we can answer them on the show. You can ask questions via email to chris@logicalawesome.com or @github a chirrp on Twitter.

While technical questions are great, so are conceptual ones. Feel free to ask about the GitHub workflow, about our setup, whatever. Sky’s the limit.

Thanks!

It’s almost that time. If you’re seeing the message below, please head to your account page and either upgrade your plan or take the steps necessary to limit your usage to the plan you want.

You may need to make some private repositories public, delete large repositories, or tell your friends to delete their forks of your private repository.

Questions? We’re always at support@logicalawesome.com and almost always at #github on Freenode. Also, the Google group is very helpful.

Thanks! It’s been a great first week.

Some people are wondering what will happen to their private repositories next Thursday if they exceed their plan’s limit. Well, they’ll simply become inaccessible. You should clone and delete them before that happens to make sure you have a local copy of your code (which is nice to have anyway).

We would never consider making your private information public.

Know how to add changes to a previous commit? Commit only part of a changed file? Change the message of a commit 30 commits ago?

If not, check out Ryan Tomayko’s The Thing About Git. Great post, lots of advanced Git usage in there.

Update: Hey, got a trick or two of your own? Add them to the guide!

Dustin has posted a great article comparing Git to Mercurial. He’s obviously used both extensively and gives a level headed, interesting look at how they differ.

Love the quote at the end:

Although mercurial may still feel nicer today, the change [to git] feels inevitable. This flood of people leaving centralized systems means that it’s way easier to contribute to their projects than ever before. This is the important part.

In the end, we all win either way.

Eric Goodwin has posted a short tutorial entitled Pushing and Pulling Branches on GitHub. It’s a must read if you’re interested in sharing work with your peers on a branch other than master.

Last summer, before GitHub, I spent a lot of time playing with Shoes. Ruby has always been lacking in the GUI department and Shoes is a really smart, innovative, cross-platform approach to the problem.

Guess what? Yep. It’s here. Follow along at the GitHub repository and why’s excellent blog, Hackety Hack.