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Step 1: Create GitHub Repo

To start a new project, in this case a Python project, we need to create a home for the code on GitHub. All programming projects should be managed using some form of source code control system. Today, the most popular system is Git, developed by Linus Torvalds of Linux fame. For projects managed using Git GitHub is probably the most popular site to host your Open Source code. (So popular that Microsoft bought GitHub a few years ago!)

Create a GitHub Account

GitHub is a free service for most folks. They do offer paid services, but those are not important in this project.

Navigate to their website and click on the sign up button on the page. You will need to come up with a suitable user name (mine is rblack42) and provide a password and a valid email address. Once your account is active, you will have a home page on GitHub that you can reach by navigating to GitHub like so:

https://github.com/rblack42

You will need to provide your credentials to gain access, but you can add a public key to your account and set up things to allow immediate access. This is very handy. See GitHub Setup for more information.

You can edit your public profile to provide an image of you and other information folks browsing your site may find interesting. GitHub is a great place to show off your programming skills and interests.

Create the Project Repository

Navigate to your GitHub home page. Click on your account icon at the top right of the window. Select Your Repositories, then click on the New button. You need to come up with a project name. For this project, I am using math-magik. I add a suitable License to the project but I do not add anything else at this point. I will configure things later.

Workstation setup

Before you proceed further in this project, you need to get a few tools installed on your development machine. Basically we will be using these tools for this project:

I like to use the command line for some things, but for this project, I will focus on using PyCharm as much as possible.

Details on installing these tools on your machine are included in the Appendix (Tool Setup)

Clone this Repo

Once the basic repository is in place on GitHub, we need to “clone” it on our local workstation to start development work. I keep all of my active development projects in a directory named _dev on my development machine (I use a Macbook Pro). This sets up a new directory in _dev with the project name. This is a git- repository already ready to post changes to the project back up to the GitHub server.

Note

if you are a developer and wish to contribute to the Math-Magik project, please follow the instructions at Contributing to get properly set up. If you “clone” the main project directly, you will not be able to post your changes in a way I can use.