8Brackets and remote repositories

This is probably the most common situation that arises when working with remote repositories (not so much in my case, the Practical Series website has so far been a solo effort—I don’t always play well with others—I usually do things my own way and I’m too old to change now—most people get used to me in the end, back me or sack me that’s my motto).

Where the repository is a team effort, the remote repository quite often changes and moves ahead of your local copy. The remote repository should always be considered the master repository.

To illustrate the point, let’s make a change to the d-03-contact branch on the remote repository and see how we get this back into our local repository using Brackets.

To GitHub then. Open the lab-01-website repository in GitHub and switch to the d-03-contact branch. It should look like this:

Figure 8.32   GitHub—README.md on the d-03-contact branch

Make sure d-03-contact is selected in the branch button. Now click the README.md file (this is the file we are going to change); it’s highlighted in Figure 8.32. This will show a preview of the README.md file:

Figure 8.33   GitHub—README.md preview page

To edit the file click the pencil symbol (highlighted).This now puts us on the edit page (Figure 8.34):

Figure 8.34   GitHub—edit README.md

Let’s add some more text to the file, add the following:

## Website contents
This site contains the following pages:
* index.html
* 01-intro.html
* 02-about.html
* 03-contact.html

It looks like this on GitHub:

Figure 8.35   GitHub—README.md modifications (highlighted)

If you click the preview changes tab, it will show how the page looks:

Figure 8.36   GitHub—README.md modifications preview

To commit the change we need to complete the boxes at the bottom by adding the commit message:

Figure 8.37   GitHub—README.md commit message

Enter the commit message as shown above and click the green commit changes button.

Now go back to the repository home page by clicking the lab-01-website link next to the branch button (highlighted below):

Figure 8.38   GitHub—go to repository home page

The home page now looks like this (make sure the d-03-contact branch is selected):

Figure 8.39   GitHub—new commit on d-03-contact branch

There is a new commit, it is [4da998f] and the workflow is:

Figure 8.40   Remote repository workflow

To summarise, the remote repository now has an extra commit on the d-03-contact branch:

Back to Brackets. My local repository looks like this in Brackets (I’m on the d-03-contact branch):

Figure 8.41   Brackets—d-03-contact commit history

In Brackets, there is nothing to indicate that it knows of any changes to the remote repository.

To refresh Brackets with data from the remote repository click the fetch button .

This will open (briefly) the fetch in progress screen:

Figure 8.42   Brackets—Fetch in progress

This refreshes the Git pane counters:

Figure 8.43   Bracket—updated counters

At this point, nothing has actually changed; the changes made to README.md in the remote repository are still not present on the local repository. All we’ve done is ask Brackets to check the status of the remote repository.

Brackets has detected that the remote repository has an additional commit, hence the number 1 in the git pull button: .

Let’s copy (pull in Git terminology) the remote repository into the local repository. Click the git pull button: . This opens the pull dialogue box:

Figure 8.44   Bracket—pull dialogue box

There is nothing to change here, click ok. This give the response screen.

Figure 8.45   Bracket—pull response dialogue box

Click close, and look at the commit history, in my case I have Figure 8.46:

Figure 8.46   Bracket—after the pull

The new commit from the remote repository is visible [4da998f], and the changes made to README.md are visible in the local working copy.

The only thing that is missing is a tag for the new commit. This is because I didn’t assign one in GitHub. I cover this in section 9.6.

In Brackets, give the new commit point [4da998f] the tag d-P03.03.02.

Do a git push and in the dialogue box tick the send tags box (just like Figure 8.27).

The report will say that there were no changes to be made, and this is true (we haven’t changed the code or added a commit point); however it will push the new tag and if you look at that branch in GitHub it will have 10 releases.