LearnGitBranching

LearnGitBranching is a pseudo-git sandbox and interactive series of tutorials / challenges to accelerate the understanding of how git commit trees work. The ideal audience is a complete newcomer to git, but a wide range of experience levels should be able to benefit from these tutorials.

It supports a fairly wide range of commands and dynamically visualizes the effects each change has on a commit tree visualization next to the command box:

You can see the demo here: http://pcottle.github.com/learnGitBranching/?demo

or use the vanilla app here: http://pcottle.github.com/learnGitBranching/

Sandbox Mode

Sandbox mode is where you can mess around and just see what certain git commands do. It is moderately helpful, but the real magic lies in levels...

Levels

Type levels to see the available levels. These are a mix of tutorials and challenges to introduce git concepts and get newcomers familiar with certain workflows. There is also a "git golf" concept that tracks how many commands you used to solve the level :P

Level Builder

You can build levels with build level. The dialog should walk you through the majority of the commands -- at the end you will get a JSON blob that you can share with friends or paste into a Github issue.

Contributing Levels

I would love for more levels to be added! I think there is a ton to learn and cover. Hopefully the community together can build a great tool for all git newcomers. You can make your own levels with

build level

In the application. You will be walked through the process, and at the end you can export level to get a JSON blob. Paste that in a gist or directly into an issue and I can check it out / merge in your changes!

Contributing Functionality

For contributing core functionality in the app, you will need to install the grunt build tool. The general steps:

git clone <your fork of the repo>
cd learnGitBranching
npm install
git checkout -b newAwesomeFeature
# some changes
grunt build # now you can open up your browser to the index.html and see your changes
grunt watch # will keep watch over files and fastBuild whenever they change
# more changes
grunt build
git commit -am "My new sweet feature!"
git push
# go online and request a pull

You may also need to install jasmine-node globally to run the testing task, but the build should finish regardless.

Helpful Folks

A big shoutout to these brave souls for extensively testing our sandbox and finding bugs and/or inconsistencies:

• Nikita Kouevda
• Maksim Ioffe
• Dan Miller

And the following heroes for assisting in translating:

• Jake Chen
• 우리깃 ("urigit")
• "bcho"
• "scientific-coder"
• "ace-coder"

Also huge shoutout for everyone who has put up a pull request that was pulled:

• Aaron Schrab - 5x!!
• Stephen Cavaliere
• Andrew Ardill
• Shao-Chung Chen
• Tobias Pfeiffer
• Luke Kysow - 2
• Adam Brodzinski
• Hamish Macpherson
• Cameron Wills
• Johan ("josso")
• Frode Austvik
• Don Kirkby x2
• "scientific-coder"
• "ace-coder"
• Jeffrey Fisher
• Brad Smith
• Allen Guo
• Timothy Qiu

Or reported an issue that was successfully closed!

• Caspar Krieger
• Stuart Knightley
• John Gietzen
• Chris Greene
• "datton"
• Jaymes Bearden
• Jan-Erik Rediger
• Scott Bigelow
• "ortin"
• Dave Myron
• "chosenken"
• Mael P ("maelp")
• "flying-sheep"
• "arianvp"
• "MaPePeR"
• Lutz ("mobilutz")
• Jan Philipp
• Jon Frisby
• Matthew Walker
• Duane Johnson
• Neil Chue Hong
• "Goodwine"
• Brandon McCaig
• Borislav Kosharov
• Ben Heavner
• Michael (mick-d)
• Adam Brewer
• Tobias Pfeiffer
• Nicholas "LB" Braden
• Jeffrey Jones