How to add a project to GitHub

Although the GitHub docs contains good info on how to add an existing GitHub project to your local machine, how to add an existing (unversioned) project from your local machine to GitHub was a little less clear to me. Here are the steps I use.

From IntelliJ

• Select ‘VCS’ menu -> Import in Version Control -> Share project on GitHub.
• You may be prompted for you GitHub, or IntelliJ Master, password
• Select the files to commit

In the latest version (v13) of IntelliJ, you will then be prompted for which files you wish to include as part of the initial commit. Obviously deselect anything in the target (aka classes) folder. I also exclude the .idea folder. Click OK and you new project and files should now be available via GitHub!

In older versions of IntelliJ, this step (somewhat strangely) created the project with just the readme. Follow the the next step to add the other files.

To add more files:

• Select files to add
• Right click -> Git -> Add
• Commit files (Ctrl-K or VCS -> Git -> Commit) [Commit & push easier, but can also just Commit]
• If files not pushed in step above, VCS -> Git -> Push

From command line

The following steps do the same thing from the command line:

• Create a new repository
• cd to your project directory e.g. cd projects/newproject
• Run the following git commands
  • git init
  • git add .
  • 
git commit -m “Initial commit”
    • warning: the quotes can get messed up when doing a copy & paste.
    • If you see this error: pathspec ‘commit”’ did not match any file(s) known to git.
    • then just retype the quotes on the command line
  • git remote add origin https://github.com/username/projectname.git
    
    • I think: git remote add origin git@github.com:username/projectname.git does the same thing.
    • The ‘origin’ name is arbitrary (As with branch naming, remote alias names are arbitrary – just as ‘master’ has no special meaning but is widely used because git init sets it up by default, ‘origin’ is often used as a remote name because git clone sets it up by default as the cloned-from URL. You can really name it just about anything.)
  • git push -u origin master (or just ‘git push’ and follow the prompt!)
  • (Note to remove a remote again: git remote rm origin)

References

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2866872/how-to-upload-fresh-code-at-github

 

Tags: git, github, intellij, vcs, versioncontrol