Intro

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So Yesterday was the last day of the bootcamp i was teaching and since i saw that some people still needed help ; i made this blog post summarizing the entire bootcamp in a relatively short blog post so let’s begin

First Day

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Terminology:

• Directory -> Folder
• Terminal -> Basically CMD
• Git Bash -> CMD but with Bash Syntax

Plan :

• what is git
• history of git.
• how git works under the hood
• explain porcelain and plumbing commands

what is git

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git is the defacto standard Version control system currently.a version control system can be defined as a system which allows people to see,modify and remove past versions of a project. now many of you may know github which is a hosted version of git. so now i’ll tell you about why git was made

History of git

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git was made by linus torvalds creator of linux in just a week because they broke the license of their SCM at the time being BitKeeper , if you want to know more open up google i’m just gonna start the practical part

How git works under the hood

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how most people would do versioning without git

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you would make a copy of the current version directory and place it in a separate “versions” directory maybe use symlinks to lessen the size requirement

how does git do it

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The long way

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git basically makes it’s own content addressable file system called the object Database it behaves much like a key:value store where each key is the hash of the file the hash function is SHA-1

the object database is stored in the objects directory under the .git hidden directory and the objects are stored in subdirectories based on the first byte of the key is used to name the subdirectory and the rest are used to name the file containing the object the reason why it does that is to reduce the number of files per directory as some file systems like fat-32 only allow about 65,536 files per directory and also just so you know the blob which is the object in this context only contains the contents of the file it doesn’t contain the file name or any metadata how does git solve the no file name problem it uses the git tree object you can think of a tree as a directory in a file system so a tree consists of other trees and blobs which is best as it allows the system to reuse the subtrees once a tree is created it is stored in the object database but we may forget the id of the tree which contains the change so we decide to write it to a file where we add a message describing the change and the author of said change and it is also helpful to know how the project changed overtime so each time we make a change we store a reference to the previous one the information about a single change is called a commit which also are objects so they are stored in the database we can use commit ids to retrieve the state of the project at any time we can also see the history of the changes , unfortunately git uses SHA-1 for the commit ids which isn’t very user friendly it is waaay too long to type by hand so git uses branches which is just a reference to a commit and we can give it whatever name we want , next time we want to look at the state of the project we just use the branch name to view it instead of the commit id Note that Commits are immutable they are calculated from the contents so if the content changes the id will change too whilst branches are mutable so we can change them at any time in fact each time you commit to a repository the branch is automatically updated to point to the latest commit

the Short way

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Content Addressable File System

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Git creates its own content addressable file system called the object database. It works like a key:value store where each key is the SHA-1 hash of the file.

Object Database Structure

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• Storage Location: The object database is stored in the objects directory, located under the hidden .git folder.
• Subdirectory Organization: Objects are placed in subdirectories based on the first byte of the hash (which names the subdirectory) while the rest of the hash names the file. This is done to reduce the number of files per directory on file systems (like FAT-32) that have file limits.

Blob Objects

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• Definition: A blob is an object that holds only the content of a file.
• Limitation: Blobs do not store file names or metadata.

Tree Objects

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• Purpose: To resolve the missing file name issue, Git uses a tree object.
• Functionality: A tree acts like a directory, containing references to blobs (files) and other trees (subdirectories), thereby allowing reuse of subtrees.

Commit Objects

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• Snapshot of Change: When changes occur, Git creates a commit object that includes:
  • A message describing the change.
  • The author’s information.
  • A reference to the previous commit, forming the history.
• Immutability: Commits are immutable because they are calculated from content; any change results in a different commit id.

Branches as User-Friendly References

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• Simplification: Since commit ids (SHA-1 hashes) are long, Git uses branches as mutable pointers to commits.
• Usage: Branches allow users to refer to a commit with a simple name, updating automatically when new commits are made.

this is basically how git works under the hood so in summary :

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• git stores objects in the object database
• object types : Commits , Trees , Blobs
• A blob Represents a file’s content
• a tree represents a directory
• a commit is a snapshot of the project

now we’ll begin on actually using git

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if you are on windows first install chocolatey through this website Make sure you are in an Administrator Instance of your terminal https://chocolatey.org/install if you are on linux use your package manager i don’t think you need me to tell you how

if you are on mac run this commands

xcode-select --install 

also while you are at it mac people install homebrew trust me you’ll need it just run this command

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

all the commands are in the discord server in the resources channel windows people you all should switch to git bash from now on

now we’ll use some git commands to access the object database First Clone this Repository

git clone https://github.com/abo3skr2019/Bootcamp-Example

or

git clone [email protected]:abo3skr2019/Bootcamp-Example

The SSH Styled One is better but there is Setup you have to do to access private repositories so i’ll skip it for now

so after you clone the repo cd into it

cd Bootcamp-Example

now run these command

this command gives you the commit history in your current branch

git log --oneline

the ls-tree command is a plumbing command you won’t use it much it shows you the children of the tree and since commits are just trees with extra information we can access the trees with init using that same command

git ls-tree $Commit-ID

git ls-tree $Tree-ID

and now you see the contents now try making a nested tree named nested-tree which contains a blob called nested-blob do all this from the terminal do not use your editors if you want to add content to a file from the terminal use echo

echo "CONTENT" >> $Filename

if you want to commit a file use these 2 commands this does a process called staging you can think of it as preparing the edits to be committed

git add $File

This does the Commit as was explained before

git commit -m "$message"

then check if each participant was able to do that !

Day 2

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so Today is gonna be almost completely Practical first of all install hugo the Command for all the Platforms is in the discord Resources channel now that you all have installed hugo i’ll explain what hugo is hugo is a static site generator so it generates static html from content you provide it in this case it is markdown files as that is what is mostly used by the industry although you can still write html , emacs org mode , pandoc , and other files instead so first how does markdown work , markdown is a markup language so when you write # that directly translates to html as H1 and the more # you add it increases the heading deepnes so ## is h2 ### is h3 and so and so forth so before i begin actually teaching you markdown let’s see if some of you recognize this syntax as it is used by many application including Notion,Obsidian,Whatsapp, and Discord and many more so to bold a statement you surround the word with a double “” to emphasize/italicize you use either “_” or a single asterisk “” to hyperlink to something you use this syntax [Text](Link) so let’s begin making that blog so first of all let’s install hugo our SSG(Static site generator) so if you are on windows open up a Terminal instance as administrator using this hotkey (Win+X) and then in the administrator instance use this command to install gohugo

choco install hugo-extended

then back in git-bash make a directory for your projects

mkdir Code-Projects

then cd into it

cd Code-Projects

Then run this command to create our hugo website

hugo new site myBlog

then CD into the Directory Created

cd myBlog

then initilize the git repository by running this commands

git init

Now we’ll add a Theme From the Hugo Theme’s Website I’ll use the blowfish theme

git submodule add -b main https://github.com/nunocoracao/blowfish.git themes/blowfish

now we’ll make a readme file so first we need to create an empty markdown file named README.md so we’ll use the touch command

touch README.md

make sure that README isn’t misspelled

now we’ll add a heading open up your code editor i’ll be using vscode

code .

and then just add at the top of the file this

# Introduction
This is a blog made in the **"Create a blog Using git"** Boot-camp Presented by [*Abdulaziz Askar*](https://github.com/abo3skr2019)

then run this command to add & Commit your changes to the Repository

git commit -am "Hugo Init"

Day 3

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Now let’s setup the theme and upload the Blog to github

Blog Setup

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Theme Settings

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first we Copy over the Configuration

cp theme/blowfish/config config -r

remove the autogenerated hugo.toml

rm hugo.toml

Then we open vscode

code .

then in Hugo.toml uncomment

theme = "blowfish"

in languages.en.toml Uncomment and Edit these fields

 [params.author]
   name = "Your name here"
   email = "[email protected]"
   headline = "I'm only human"
   bio = "A little bit about you"

and also some of the socials if you want just make sure to uncomment links and the end square bracket for the site to work

#   links = [
#     { email = "mailto:hello@your_domain.com" },
#     { github = "https://github.com/username" },
#     { linkedin = "https://linkedin.com/in/username" },
#     { x-twitter = "https://twitter.com/username" },
#     { youtube = "https://youtube.com/username" },
#   ]

in menus.en.toml uncomment these

[[main]]
  name = "Blog"
  pageRef = "posts"
  weight = 10

in params.toml Change ShowRecent to True

Let’s make some content

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to make content in hugo we use the new keyword and also we specify that it is content so and there are many ways to organize content you can do it with folders and indexes like this

hugo new content posts/25/march/Git-bootcamp/index.md

or you could just do a single markdown file like this

hugo new content posts/25/march/Git-bootcamp.md

so now that we made our content it should make a file in the location specified that looks like this

+++
title = 'Filename'
date = Current Date
draft = false
+++

this is called frontmatter which functions kinda like metadata so we can add things like tags and categories like this

+++
title = 'Filename'
date = Current Date
draft = false
tags : 
- Tag1
- Tag2
- Tag3
categories : 
- Cat1
- Cat2
- Cat3
+++

now that we are finished with the front matter let’s add some content as explained above hugo uses markdown syntax for content so let’s use some markdown!

+++
title = 'Filename'
date = Current Date
draft = false
tags : 
- Tag1
- Tag2
- Tag3
categories : 
- Cat1
- Cat2
- Cat3
+++
# This is a Sample Post
For the Git Bootcamp Summary

then let’s check our work in your vscode or git bash terminal run this command

hugo server

and access the website at https://localhost:1313

is your website working ? yes, then let’s continue add all your changes and commit them to your repository

git commit -am "Setup Theme"

let’s upload our git repository to github

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there are 3 ways the easy way and the bit more difficult way and the difficult way

The Easy Way

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In Vscode open up the source control menu either using your mouse or the hotkey(Alt+NumPad9) then Click on Publish branch and follow the steps that vscode tells you to do Note : Make sure that your repository is public as if it is private you can’t deploy on github pages

The bit more difficult way

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Install the github CLI

choco install gh

then use the github CLI b executing this command

gh repo create myBlog --public --source=. --remote=origin

the difficult way

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• Go to Github
• Create an Account if you don’t Have one
• Clicking the “+” in the top-right corner → New repository
• Give it the name of your repository in this case Blog then copy the repository URL and run:

git remote add origin https://github.com/$your-username/myBlog

Verify the remote was added:

git remote -v

Finally, push the local repository to GitHub:

git branch -M main  # Rename branch to 'main' if needed

git push -u origin main

after doing that

let’s deploy the Blog on github pages

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• Open up github then go to your repository it should be in this link https://github.com/$your-username/myBlog
• open up your repositories settings it should be in this link https://github.com/$your-username/myblog/settings
• go to pages then click on the selector under source it should say deploy from branch click on it and change it to Github Actions then when the website reloads the Site should look different
• under the Github Actions selector it should say Use a suggested workflow, browse all workflows, or create your own. click on Browse all Workflows it will take to this page https://github.com/$your-username/myblog/actions/new in it search for hugo and then click on configure then in the top right corner click on commit changes

this should publish your website on github pages you can find the link of your website here https://github.com/$your-username/myblog/settings/pages

Further Reading / Watching

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• This short Youtube Video on how git works under the hood
• This Free Youtube Course by the Primagen
• This Talk By one of the founders of github
• The Blowfish Docs
• The goHugo Docs