Skip to content

Basic Setup

Robert Speck edited this page Jan 19, 2016 · 13 revisions

To contribute to the JLESC website, only a few very basic things are required on your computer:

  • Linux or OSX operating system.

    ❗ Windows is not tested and will most likely mess things up. ❗

  • Git

  • your favourite plain text editor 1
    potentially with Markdown support (i.e. syntax higlighting)

For people contributing on a regular basis or handing in larger changes, we strongly recommend setting up a local environment to test the site locally.

Preparations

These steps are usually only required to be done once (unless you really mess something up 😉).

In the Web Browser

  1. Get a GitHub account. It is free and no hidden costs are burried.

  2. Log into your GitHub account. All following steps are assuming you are logged in.

  3. Fork the JLESC website repository to your account.

    This creates a non-synchronised copy of the website repository in your account.

On your Computer

  1. Setup Git
    For the sake of clarity and to avoid confusion with your collegues, please use your real (full) name (as you do on papers) and your email address of your official JLESC affiliation (i.e. ANL, JSC, etc.)

  2. Configure SSH
    We strongly encourage people to use SSH and NOT HTTPS!

  3. Find yourself a nice place for the JLESC website repository to live in on your computer, e.g. $HOME/projects:

     cd $HOME/projects
    
  4. Clone the JLESC website repository:

     git clone [email protected]:JLESC/jlesc.github.io
     cd jlesc.github.io
     git remote rename origin upstream
    
  5. Configure your personal fork:

     git remote add myone [email protected]:<YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME>/jlesc.github.io
    

    Hopefully, it is obvious that you replace <YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME> above with your actual GitHub username, i.e. torbjoernk

    You will use the upstream repository (Git know it as upstream) to receive updates and your own fork (Git will know it as myone) to push your changes and additions to.

As stated above, these steps should only be required once. To contribute, read on the Contributor's Workflow.


1: In general it is also possible to add and modify the content without leaving GitHub and the comfort of the web browser. However, we will not discuss this option here as we advice against it.