Let’s Create A Repo
Now that you have your Github account you are ready to rock! The first thing we are going to do is to create a new “repository” or “repo” for short. A repo is a collection of files you work together. Ideally you should have a repo for a bunch of related things, like maybe a repo for your person website, which we are going to create in this section. Or maybe a repo for a project you are doing in your school/at work.
A repo can be public or private. A public repo is visible to everyone, so be careful about what you put there, do not put anything confidential there, no personal phone numbers or address, no credit card etc.
So let’s create our first repo.Meet fastn-template
You are going to create your first repo from a template. We can create a empty repo as well, and start from scratch, but that is a little bit more work and covered in appendix.
We are going to use the official template created by fastn team for you: github.com/fastn-stack/fastn-template.
You will a green button with label “Use This Template”, you have to click on it.
It shows you two options:
What If You Don’t See The Button?
fastn-template page on Mobile browser, or if you are using Laptop/Desktop and browser window is not wide enough, Github hides the “Use This Template” button.
If this happens you can click on the direct link to use the template: github.com/fastn-stack/fastn-template/generate. Please do note that if you are not logged in and click on the link, Github shows page not found error.
Create Your Repo
You have to select a name for your repo. In the image above you will see I have entered hello. The name of the repo is very important. If you select say hello, the “qualified name” of your repo becomes your <username>/hello, eg in my case the qualified name of repo would be amitu/hello, and the URL of your repository would be github.com/<username>/<repo-name>, so in my case the name would be github.com/amitu/hello. The name will appear in a few more places. It is usually a good practice to follow either cabab-case or CamelCase for naming your repo, and we recommend cabab-case. Which means if you are using more than one words in the name, keep each word lower cased, and separate the words by a single - (dash) character.
You can leave the rest of the default values, and click on the big green “Create repository from template” button.
Once you do that you will see something like this:
git repository, containing a fastn package. Let’s take a quick peek around at the files we have put in the template for you.The FASTN.ftd file
One of the most important files is the FASTN.ftd file. As you notice the extension of the file is .ftd, it is a ftd file. ftd is a language at the center of fastn. Take a look at it maybe, but do not worry if it does not make much sense, we will go over the syntax and the content later on.
FASTN.ftd indicates that this folder is a fastn package. Every fastn package has this file in it. This file is a high level “configuration” file for fastn, which tellsindex.ftd file
fastn is a framework for building web pages and web apps. fastn tends to support conventions, over configurations, meaning for example in this case, the convention is to map the URL /, which is the root URL of your site to a file named index.ftd. This is a common enough convention, a lot of applications have a default file to map at the root, they are often index.html, or index.php etc.
index.ftd is found it will be “rendered” when someone visits the root URL of you site. Go ahead take a look at it’s content..gitignore file
.gitignore file tells git what files to ignore. You do not want to store all the files in your repository. If you have extra files you will have to keep downloading them every time you download your repository. Also often the extra files will change and leave traces in the history of changes, making the changes appear noisy.
You often ignore editor configuration files, here you will find .idea, which is for the editor we often use. You also ignore the operating system meta data files, eg .DS_Store, which Macos creates to store some Mac specific information, which you probably do not care too much.
fastn, .packages and .build ignored. .packages is where we download and store dependencies for you. If you review FASTN.ftd you will see we added a few dependencies, and they will be downloaded and stored. Similarly .build is a folder that fastn creates to store some information, that you do not have to store in version control..github folder
.github folder contains a few Github related files. Github is a very feature rich platform, and this folder can be used to configure many of those features.
.github folder assist you with hosting.Let’s Talk About Commits
You will notice a few key differences between the two states. You will see that instead of “initial commit” it says “✅ Ready to clone and code”, next to each file listed. This message is called a “commit” message, and Github shows the latest commit message next to each file or folder where it was modified, along with when was it last modified. You will notice that two files, .gitignore and doc-site-example.png are still saying “initial commit”, where as rest of them are showing the “✅ Ready to clone and code” message.
This is a lot happening, so let’s break it down a bit.
When you created your repo from our template repo, fastn-template, a bunch of files were copied over, and added to your repository. In git, any change happens through what is called a commit, each commit can modify one or more files, add files, delete files etc, and each commit has a message.
The way git works is you make changes, in one or more files in your repo, and when you are satisfied, you “commit” these changes, and while committing git asks for a “commit message” so you can describe what changes you have done.
Commit messages are quite useful as you may be working with a team and others in a team may want to know what were you thinking when you made those changes. Or may be you are working alone, even then good commit messages are quite useful as you may come back to your repository after weeks and months and you may have forgotten what was going on.
Let’s take a look at the commits in our repo so far. You can click on the commit count and it takes you to the following page:
You can see the two commits, one made by me, the person who created the repository (acutally Github made the commit when we created the repo from fastn-template). The second commit was made by github-actions[bot].
github-actions[bot]? Why is it making commits to your repo? And how can you make a commit? To learn all this you have to move to the next section!Next Step
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