Okay, I am fairly new to GitHub. And initially, I used to struggle a lot with adding my local projects to GitHub.
I created a cheat sheet, so here it goes.
0. Pre-requisites:
Git on your local machine
Here is a neat article to help with that.
1. Create new repository on github.
Do not initialize .gitignore or readme at this point.
2. In your project root folder, create a .gitignore file.
In this file, add all the folder and the file extensions that you wouldn't want in the remote repository.
The following is an example .gitignore for a java project.
*.class
# Mobile Tools for Java (J2ME)
.mtj.tmp/
# Package Files #
*.jar
*.war
*.ear
# virtual machine crash logs, see http://www.java.com/en/download/help/error_hotspot.xml
hs_err_pid*
#folders
logs/
target/
#other
*.classpath
*.project
*.settings
*.pdf
3. Initialize local repo
In your local, navigate to the project folder from your favorite command prompt
git init -b main
4. Add all files from your project to your local
git add .
5. See the status of changes in local
git status
6. Commit to local
git commit -m "commit message"
On a side note, it's a great practice to keep committing to your local in small increments. That way, if you see that a code change is breaking and don't know which line did that, it's easy to revert back to a stable version.
7. Specify the remote repo for current local repo
git remote add origin https://github.com/username/repo
8. Add files from local to remote
git push origin main
9. Add a README.md file in github repo.
10. In case you want to update local from remote
git pull origin main
That's it, you did it :)
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