- Part four of this Git slash
GitHub for Poets tutorial. I'm going to talk about GitHub issues, how to file an issue and then, also how to refer to that particular issue as you are working on particular commits. Now, what are GitHub issues for? Now this is one of the few
things that I'm showing you that's actually not
necessarily a Git concept. This is purely something
that exists as a layer on the GitHub website. So one, at some point when
you take your repository and put it locally onto your laptop, which I'll show you I
think in the next video, those issues won't come. The issues just are for the
purpose of collaborating through the GitHub website itself. But they do play a vital
role and I find them incredibly useful in managing complex software collaborative
GitHub project thingymabobs. Okay, so any repository. Here I have the Rainbow Poem repository, you never know when a pull
request is going to come in while I'm making this video by the way, I did refresh it. Hope I see a pull request. No, okay whatever. There's one but that's an old one. Ah, I'm off the track here. Okay, so let's look here. There is a button here, a link here, up here, called Issues. Issues is a place to leave
a comment about a project. You know this can be a variety of things. It can be I found a bug,
when I pressed this button on this app the whole thing crashes or it can be I noticed that
this word was misspelled or this... It can also, you can Issues to add feature requests or ask questions. In general, an issue,
GitHub issues are not really meant for the types of
things you might find on a programing help forum. They're more specific
questions and issues and bugs and feature topic discussions
around a particular project. That said, all projects
in GitHub repositories probably treat and use
Issues in different ways. You can use labels. You can organize them. So many possibilities. What I will say to you
is that in particular if you're watching these
videos and you're interested in Processing or p5.js some
of this can feel very scary and intimidating, like I'm going to file. I found what I think is a bug,
but I'm going to file an issue. I'm going to write something
and everyone's going to come in and yell at me and
tell me I did it wrong. And I will say to you that
this is not the way the world should work or GitHub
or Git should work or, in particular, please if you're not sure file the issue anyway in
Processing or p5.js projects. Write at Shiffman in your description to say that I said you should. Don't worry, there's no
way you can do it wrong. The point of the community
is to be open and welcoming and to help everybody figure
out how to do all this stuff. Nobody really knows how to do it anyway. The people who say that they
do probably don't really. I definitely don't. So anyway, please I'm also
just making this video to encourage you to file GitHub issues and participate in the
open source community. Now, let's say I go over
here and click on Issues. There aren't any issues
because there aren't any, but I'm going to write a new issue. So I click here and write a new issue. Issues should get a title
like Today is Earth Day. Today is Earth Day and I think the poem should reflect that. Now, another thing you could
do which is really useful, this a little bit of
an aside, but let's say you're trying to reference
something that's visual. You can quickly take a
screenshot of something. I just took a screenshot
and I can actually just, right down here that screenshot should be right here on the desktop. You can see that image file. I can drag that screenshot right into here and it's going to upload it to the issue. I can go here under Preview and I can see this is what
my issue looks like now. It has an image in it and also, the other thing
that I should point out, is this entire issue thread
you can use something called Markdown which is a special kind of markup for writing things. For example, this is a link. So this is the syntax for having a link to something you can see and this is bold, I think, or maybe that's italic. That's bold. So there's a lot of
markup that you can learn and if you want to learn
about that you can... Somewhere on here,
there's a styling Markdown with Markdown is supported and if I click on that it's taking me to a whole page which gives me all the
stuff about Markdown. But that's a little bit of an aside. So you can see now, I am writing my issue and I'm going to now click Submit Now. I could add labels. Like I could say it's
a bug, a help wanted. You know there's a sort
of standard labels. I can create my own labels. I could add it to a milestone. I could assign it to somebody saying like this is a thing you should work on. I'm going to assign it
to myself, RainbowCoder and then I'm going to
now Submit this issue. And you can see now the issue is submitted and if I click back on Issues, here is a list of all the issues. Now, notice a very important thing here. I have one open issue
and zero closed issue. An issue is open until it is resolved. When it is resolved it is closed. Only the person who submitted the issue or the owner of the
repository can close an issue. So you should know by the
way, that what I'm doing even though I'm the
owner of this repository and I'm submitting the
issue to this repository... I never, I have a timer
going to figure out how long these videos are and I never
hit start on the timer. (laughs) I'll hit start now. I've probably been talking
for about five minutes. But, so as I was saying a
second ago, that I am the owner of this repository and
I'm submitting issues but you as somebody else could come, you could submit issues to any repository. Now, let's say I want
to resolve this issue. So pretending it wasn't
me that submitted it or it doesn't matter even if
it was me that submitted it, I now want to make a change in my poem to acknowledge this particular issue and I want to refer back to that issue. So let's do that. I'm going to go to... I'm actually going to just open a new tab so I can come back to that tab. And I'm going to go here, I'm
going to go back to the poem and I'm going to click Edit. And I'm going to zoom in here and I'm going to write at
the top Today is Earth Day. That probably has capitals, Earth Day, it's like a holiday, special thing. So I'm going to write today is Earth Day and I'm going to say
adding Earth Day as per... Now, how do I refer to a particular issue? All issues have an ID number
and I'm going to go back to this tab and see what
is this issue's ID number. It's actually number 10,
which is surprising to me. I would have thought it would
have started with number one, but that's fine and we
could be sure about that by if I click on that
link you can see up here in the URL it's issues slash
10 that's important, too. So I can actually just say in
my change as per number 10. So I am now making a commit relevant to that particular issue. I'm going to now click Commit and if I go back to this Issue page and hit Refresh, (laughs) you can see here the
camera's about to go off. It took a second for it to appear. You can see that this
page now automatically has a little entry that
said that RainbowCoder added a commit that referenced
this issue just now. This is very useful
because if some day later I want to revisit this discussion
about this particular issue, I could now click directly on this and I could see, oh, this was the change and I can look directly
at that particular change associated with that issue. Now, if I felt that that was done, I could click this Close issue and the issue would be closed. It would go into the Closed category; however, I could do something else. There are certain keywords that will automatically close an issue
with a particular commit. So, for example, I go back to the poem and I hit Edit again. Today is Earth Day, I love Earth Day as the second line of the poem. I'm adding I love Earth Day. I could say this fixes number 10, adding that I love Earth Day. So now if I use the word
fixes inside my particular commit message, it's
going to recognize that... Whoa, I don't want to close
this off the broadcast. It's going to recognize that
as a commit that fixes... Oh, I messed up the camera a little bit. It's fine, everything's okay. (laughs) It's going to recognize that, sorry. It's going to recognize that as a commit, that resolves that issue
and closes it automatically. So let's see if that happens. I'm going to say Commit and now, if I go back
to this particular issue and hit Refresh, look it's already closed. So you can see RainbowCoder
closed this in 45355f5. What's that? Remember, oops, every single... (laughs) Here I am. Every single commit on the tree of your Git repository
changes thingamabob. This light is casting a terrible shadow. It's not supposed to do that. Every single commit
has a particular unique identifier known as a hash code with it and that's what you're seeing here. So incidentally, you can also reference... You can also reference
commits in an issue, so sorry. So, I'm going to go back. I know this is a little
bit of a frantic video. I'm going to try to
think more about rainbows and the earth a be a little more calm. But, I'm going to go to my history here and I'm going to see... First of all we can see,
look at all these people contributing to this repository. Please file your pull requests. And I'm going to go and I'm
going to look this particular issue of this particular commit. I'm going to click on it and I'm going to, what I'm going to do is I'm
going to grab in the URL this full hash code and
I'm going to do Command C. So I now have copied that
and I am going to create an issue that says, I'm not
so sure about this change. I propose that we consider
doing something slightly different, though I do love the thinking. I don't know, right? And then if I paste that value in here, see how I paste that
hash code into the text of this particular issue
and then I hit Submit. You can see how that
resolves itself automatically to a link that goes directly
to that particular change, Today is Earth Day. So there's lots of things
you can do on GitHub by referencing issue numbers and referencing commit hash
codes to in your commit messages or in your issue descriptions. So, here's what I would like you to do. I would like you to do a couple of things. If you're watching this video, one, file an issue on my
Rainbow Poem repository. Say something about what you
think the poem should have. Then, I would suggest that
you make a pull request that references that
issue that resolves it. See if you can do that. I'm going to accept all of your issues and pull requests, then close them all and it'll be exciting to
see how that works for you. And once you've done that,
you're well on your way to contributing to other open
source GitHub repositories. Okay, great. So this wraps up this part four. I think it was part four
about Git and GitHub. Thanks very much for watching.
