Published update to my Practical Git and GitHub book

You can get the latest version from https://leanpub.com/Practical_Git for FREE (by choosing the $0 minimum price).

Here is the email I send to my readers:

Hi, thanks for being reader of my Practical Git and GitHub book. I just released a new version which contains a large number of content and images fixes.

This version is very similar to the previous release, but I'm planning to make big changes in the next months.

I'm going to add a number of new chapters and remove content that might be better in a different book.

I really would like your feedback, so please don't hesitate to contact me at dinis.cruz@owasp.org or directly at the GitHub repo that contains all content and current Issues: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/issues

Managing LeanPub book's Markdown content using Git and GitHub (synced to back to LeanPub via DropBox)

The original releases of my Practical AngularJS and Practical Git books were made using LeanPub's DropBox model, which was OK, but lacked two massive features: version control and interface for community interactions.

Inspired by Dennis Groves' idea and workflow described in OWASP Press and using LeanPub with GitHub and DropBox, I was able to use Git and GitHub to track changes on these books.

Which means that from now, not only can I use the GitHub repositories to track/document changes I make, but you can also submit your ideas/problems directly as GitHub issues and fixes as Pull Requests :)

Here is the GitHub repo for the AngularJS book: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_AngularJS

Here is the GitHub repo for the Git/Hub book: https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git

For an example of how to use GitHub to submit and fix an content problem see this issue https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/issues/1 which was fixed by this commit https://github.com/DinisCruz/Book_Practical_Git/commit/7c53c396f4209bb2521dccadbfcfbe8c90318ba7

Published Beta version of "Practical Git and GitHub" eBook

After releasing "Practical AngularJS", here is an equivalent book containing my Git and GitHub related posts.

The book has 411 pages and is made of 60 blog posts published in the last 18 months.

As with the first release of the AngularJS book, I'm starting with the original chronological/published order, and will try later to figure out a better logical way to group these posts together.

The article's Html was converted by LeanPub into Markdown, who also created the eBook versions linked below (pdf, mobi, epub and online)

Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 4) Create Components

This is the last of four posts on how to run (inside Eclipse) the examples provided in AngularJS's home page:

• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 1) The Basics
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 2) Add Some Control
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 3) Wire up a Backend
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 4) Create Components

The example covered on this post is the Create Components:

Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 1) The Basics

This is the first of four posts on how to run (inside Eclipse) the examples provided in AngularJS's home page:

• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 1) The Basics
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 2) Add Some Control 
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 3) Wire up a Backend
• Using AngularJS in Eclipse, Part 4) Create Components

The example covered on this post is the The Basics.

I'm doing this on an OSX laptop and the first step was to download and unzip (eclipse-standard-kepler-SR1-macosx-cocoa.tar.gz (32bit version of Eclipse's Kerpler) into the ~/_Dev/_AngularJS folder.

I fired up eclipse, chose the ~/_Dev/_AngularJS/workspace as the workspace root and installed the Eclipse Grovy REPL Scripting Environment 1.6.0 (update site) and Angular-JS Eclipse Tooling (update site) plugins.

Reverting changes mades to TeamMentor articles

The problem was simple, there were a number of commits made to an TeamMentor GitHub repo that I wanted to completely reverse (without re-writing history).

For reference this happened when I was doing some 'Link fixing' tests on a server that was configured to auto commit to GitHub (which meant that the option to do a pure git reset --hard was not available since it would break the TM server)

In this case, the last good commit was e794cc839689dfc7915099d39972abde643a969d and the last bad commit was c53002083e85673f9a4dd7e6dbd2a37bc7ff9e2f (currently HEAD of master)

My first idea was to just do a git revert to the e794cc839689dfc7915099d39972abde643a969d which worked ok locally.

But I struggled to merge it with the master HEAD, because git was being too cleaver , since it realised that these two commits were compatible, and just fast-forwarded into the most recent one (vs doing a 'reverse merge')

Syncing all releases to the same commit and Tag (for TeamMentor v3.4)

This is a bit of house keeping, as you can see by the Fixing the Merge conflict caused by one extra commit on TeamMentor master  and Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit posts, not doing this has already cause us some pain in the past.

So after some pushes and pulls (of both commits and tags) I now have the main TeamMentor repos all synchronised at the 72ca4b5d3322901266ca294678cbe15aa343a4b3 commit:

Fixing the Merge conflict caused by one extra commit on TeamMentor master

On the 3.4 Release of TeamMentor (which was the first release we really used Git Flow on development (see this great presentation on Git Branching Model) we ended up with a situation where the commit that was the parent of all feature/fix branches was off-by-one the master of the TeamMentor/Master repository (we also had to do a bunch of back-porting of fixes into that commit, see Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit post)

In practice this means that the TeamMentor/Master graph currently looks like this:

Script to Git Clone 13 repositories in order to have all TeamMentor Libraries in one folder

Part of the push for the 3.4 release of TeamMentor, I wanted to have a copy of all TeamMentor libraries locally (there are 13 libraries on the 3.4 release).

Since O2 Platform’s FluentSharp has native Git support, I was able to do create the clones using this script (note how simple it is to create a clone from a GitHub repo):

Example of using GitHub Pull Requests to merge changes made on Branches

After the fixes explained in the Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit  post and the reset of the TeamMentor 3.4 branch, Michael reapplied his other changes/fixes to the correct 3.4 commit, and I’m now in the process merging his Pull Requests into the 3.4_Release branch (and eventually into the master branch).

This post walks through my current workflow.

At the moment there are a number of Pull Requests to process:

Git Flow - Moving patches from one Commit into another Commit

This (longish) post will cover detailed git workflows and is part of the series of blog posts that show how we use the Git Flow workflow to manage TeamMentor's source code (you will also see practical applications of GitHub's powerful  of powerful features like Network Graphs and Pull Requests).

The key problem that we are going to solve, is the situation created by Michael Hidalgo’s TeamMentor fixes/commits/branches that were done against an commit (38bfcd54d8046372c0ace2409324ecc965761504) which was originally planed to be part of the next release, but we decided that the next 3.4 Release of TeamMentor will be based on the current 3.3.3 version (with is based on the earlier commit: b97a470ffa173d67a9c74373593eea03eb7a2da4).

The key reason is that he  38bfcd54d8046372c0ace2409324ecc965761504 commit (currently the parent of Michael’s fixes/branches) is not stable and is going now to be the basis of the 3.5_Release (this code contains a number of big changes which need more TLD and testing: native ASP.NET MVC routing, better Git support, native Markdown editor, depreciation of HTML WYSIWYG editor, and more)

In a nutshell, we need to re-apply Michael’s bug fixes to an earlier commit than the one used (i.e. backport those commits).

Creating a clone of WebGoat on GitHub

I needed a couple vulnerable source code examples (to use on the new TeamMentor Eclipse plug-in) so an obvious option was to use WebGoat (whose code is currently hosted at Google Code page)

But since there wasn’t a source code download option (in the current download page)

Gource Visualisation of "TeamMentor Git Development - 18 Months in 180 Seconds"

Here is a pretty cool video of 18 months of Git commits using the Gource tool which is a software version control visualization tool.

Try to see it in full screen and at 1024p HD quality:

[Great post] Git: Who cares about branches? It’s all about collaboration and code reviews

This is a great explanation of the power of Git : Who cares about branches? It’s all about collaboration and code reviews

here is the author's TL;DR:

TL;DR: Using Git has made our team much better by removing barriers to collaboration and code reviews. Those are the real Git benefits, not specific features like fast branches.

I complete agree and it is the ability to easily review code (and send code back for rewrite during pull requests) that really makes git powerful :)

On this topic also read Great presentation on Git Branching (very similar to the model we are using in TeamMentor) 

Releasing HotFix 1 for TeamMentor 3.3 (using Git to deploy updates to live servers)

This is how I updated the 3.3 version of TeamMentor to 3.3.1, which contained a fix for the Password expiry cannot be set from the main TM GUI issue

Since we are now using the Vincent Driessen GitFlow branching model (see also these Git-Flow scripts and this great presentation), after the issue 437 was reported+prioritised, all development happened on a Feature Branch called HotFix_3_3_1 (which was created from a Pull Request from Ian's own 437-Password-Expiry dev branch).

Once TM's QA (ie. Roman) was happy with the patch, it was time to push it to the first batch of TM production servers (my responsibility was to update the sme.teammentor.net server, while Roman updated the tm4tm.teammentor.net , and the rest will be updated by Michael K + Michael H). Technically I did a pull from those servers :)

Here are my steps:

Fixing bug in TBot user editor via Git merge of fix developed on another repo's branch

Here is an example of how I just created a HotFix branch to address an issue we want to push to our live servers asap, and how the fix was developed by Ian in one of this dev branches.

First I created HotFix Branch at a (freshly baked) local clone of the TeamMentor/Dev repository:

Great presentation on Git Branching (very similar to the model we are using in TeamMentor)

Just saw this presentation on Git Branching (embedded below) which is really close to the model we are currently using to manage TeamMentor's app development.

I really agree with just about everything Lemi Ergin says and this is a great description of the power of Git for branching

AzureGate - how Azure's 'subscription upgrade' crazy mode caused us to stop using Azure for VM Hosting (and Git+GitHub saved the day)

Late last night all the main TM hosted sites went down!

The reason is Azure's crazy 'subscription expired' workflow which  you can read what other Azure users had to say about it when I happened to them on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12791020/windows-azure-virtual-machine-deleted-after-spending-limit-reached-how-can-i-g and Microsoft's view on it http://blogs.msdn.com/b/narahari/archive/2012/10/18/windows-azure-virtual-machine-disappeared-or-gone-how-do-i-recover.aspx (note how the crowd in the comments are not happy with it)

Below is the email I sent internally at SI, with my debrief on what happened:

Is Git a Single point of failure for TeamMentor?

Danny is getting into Git and just asked-me this:

“is it possible for Git to be a single point of failure for TM? If Git went down or offline, wouldn’t that be a problem?”

The short answer is “NO, in fact Git is a distributed point of success for TM”

Let's start with the differences between Git and GitHub.

Think of Git as a ‘file-based database of multiple versions of a particular file, with one version shown in the file system’, i.e. ‘Git’ is the .git folder and a checkout version of the files (in the file system)

Think of GitHub as a ‘web based location to store and share the .git folder’

Linus gift to the world will be Git not Linux (and what about an OS built on top of an hash-driven file system?)

I know it is a big claim, but I think that Linus Torvalds will be more famous for creating Git than for this work on Linux

Linux is a great example of OpenSource development and a good OS. Its impact is mainly technical and behind the scenes.

Git is a hashed-based file system with built-it version control. Its impact is not only technical but social.

The more I use Git, the more I appreciate its beauty, simplicity and ability to scale while handling complex workflows.