Command Line

General introduction

Visual Studio Code is a minimized version of Visual Studio is a Microsoft software that offers extensive coding abilities as well as different tools support such as Git (Version Control), PowerShell (Microsoft official task automation tool) and many more!

In addition to the tools mentioned above VS Code offers a substantial programming languages support from C#, Python, Dockerfile to Markdown and HTML.

Why Visual Studio Code?

All of these powerful features backed by immense number of extensions that can be installed from (Microsoft Marketplace) provide a great support for the development as well as version control.

Possible software solutions

There are different Version Control tools that can be used, mostly are command line based which the user enters the commands as text without GUI (Graphical User Interface).

Setup in VS

• After installing Git on your local computer, the next thing to do is enabling it on VS Code:

• Go to File → Preferences → Settings → Extensions → git

• Look for the git: enabled checkbox and check it

• Now you have git enabled inside VS Code

Create a new project

• You can create a new project in multiple ways:

• One of the ways is you create a project within your existing repository and clone it to your computer and use it as a local repository, this way all the git dependencies will come along when you clone the repository from the website.

• The other way is to initialize a repository, this can be done in a few steps:

  • open your preferred command prompt and change directory to the folder that you would like to initialize the repository in.

  • use command git init and all of the git dependencies will be created inside a .git folder (If you cannot see it, it’s probably hidden!)

  • create a test file such as a .txt file and name it, after that use command git add --all, this command adds the data to local repository.

  • after adding the files you need to (synchronize) your local repository with your remote repository this can be done by preparing the data for upload using
    git commit -m NameOfYourFile.txt which prepares the data to be uploaded, the -m stands for message.

  • the final step is to upload/push the changes that you have made to your repository, this can be made by using git push which grabs the data you have added into your local repository and pushes it the the remote repository.

  • Open your preferred command prompt and change directory to the folder that you would like to initialize the repository in.

  • Use command git init and all the git dependencies will be created inside a .git folder (If you cannot see it, it’s probably hidden!)

  • Create a test file such as a .txt file and name it, after that use command git add --all, this command adds the data to local repository.

  • After adding the files you need to (synchronize) your local repository with your remote repository this can be done by preparing the data for upload using
    git commit -m NameOfYourFile.txt which prepares the data to be uploaded, the -m stands for message.

  • The final step is to upload/push the changes that you have made to your repository, this can be made by using git push which grabs the data you have added into your local repository and pushes it the remote repository.

Clone/Pull from an existing project

You can interact with the repository that you created either remotely inside the GitLab environment (Webpage) or locally in your computer.

• By now you have you should have your own GitLab repository, the next step is to clone it to your machine, so you can edit it more freely with a lot more functions can be done further.
• If you press in the GitLab webpage, you will be able to clone your current repository.
• Before you can clone your repository you need to specify a method for GitLab to be able to verify and authenticate your machine, and you would be able to execute all the functions seamlessly without GitLab asking for permission every time you push or pull.
• The two authentication methods used by GitLab are:
  • SSH: Stands for Secure Shell which is recommended as it is more secure. To enable SSH, please follow these steps:
    • Go to your profile icon in the GitLab website and press the dropdown arrow.
    • Go to preferences and then choose SSH Keys you will see something like this:
    • Before you can add a key first you need to generate on by:
      • Go to windows command line or any other shell and type ssh-keygen
      • First you have to choose a directory to save your Public/Private key pair on your machine
      • You need only the id_rsa.pub file which is the public key. Open the file with a text editor and copy the content of the file and paste it into the GitLab.
      • If you leave the expiry date empty, the expiry of the ssh key token will be set to never
      • Now you can execute all GitLab functions securely and without having to enter your credentials every time you synchronize with GitLab.
  • HTTPS : is more for private repositories and it less secure, so we will not further explain it.

Editing files

Editing files in Visual Studio Code is straight forward, as you change the data inside a file in your repository and save VS Code will automatically detect change and will notification indicating that change has occurred, and you can stage it then push to your repository.

Stage, Commit and Push your project

Staging

Staging your data before committing lets you choose which data you would like to commit first (Saving data to your local repository) in order to avoid the same commit message to different work on different files.

Committing

As mentioned before committing is saving the data you have changed (edited, added, deleted) to your local repository, this is done in your computer.

Pushing

Pushing is the process of uploading the change you have made in your local repository to the remote repository (Your GitLab or shared GitLab)