02 Developing Guide

Create and develop on a new branch

  git checkout -b <descriptive-task-title> development

Create a new branch off of the development branch. The development branch is where our main work collectively goes. This is currently considered our "staging" branch, and the master branch is what is currently live in production (what is usable in the Codebuddies Slack channel).

Note on branch naming

Please use a short description in relation to what you're working on.

// 𐄂 no - too vague
issue-3

// 𐄂 no - too long
welcome-message-interactivity-to-make-it-more-like-a-tour

// ✓ yes - just right
add-welcome-message-interactivity

Note on commit messages

Commit messages should be in the present tense and should be descriptive to what the commit is doing to the code. Treat commit messages as developer notes or some kind of documentation so that other developers can look back at the commit history and understand what your thought process was implementing your change.

Seeing your changes in action

Assumptions:

• You have signed up to Glitch and are invited to the staging workspace.
• You're in the Violin Covers (our staging) Slack channel.

From your local machine, git push your branch to the Greetbot repository.

In the Glitch workspace, open the workspace terminal console by:

• clicking on clean-family on the top left corner of the nav bar
• click on Advanced Options at the bottom of the drop down menu
• click on Open Console towards the top of the menu (right below < Advanced Options)

Your browser will open a new tab and it should be the terminal console of our workspace.

Next steps:

1. Get your branch in Glitch for the first time.

git fetch && git checkout <your-branch-name>

2. Your code is now accessible on the staging Slack channel and you may now test your code.

Note: You can type git up to pull in all the latest from the Github branches into Glitch. But BE WARNED: if you switch a branch on Glitch, or overwrite it, it updates everything LIVE. We need to warn each other when that happens, in the #cb-code channel.

Important: When working in Glitch, please let us know in either #cb-code or in the Violin Covers slack channel. As the staging workspace is open to all contributors, it's difficult to work in it asynchronously. As such, contributors cannot work on separate issues at the same time without overriding or confusing each others' state of code.

Please remember to switch back the branch to development when finished so that the Violin Covers slack channel is always at a stable or normalized branch that everyone can work out of.

We understand that this is not the most ideal way of collaboration and we are currently looking at other methods that can help. In the meantime, feel free to check out an alternative solution with ngrok and launching your own Slack channel.

Proceed to Submitting a Pull Request