Tutorials - Adding GitHub to Eclipse

To simplify life using GitHub one can recur to EGit a great tool that can make interaction with GitHub much more intuitive and integrated for those who like to work with IDE's instead of using the terminal!

You can find most of this tutorial on the EGit Eclipse page but I had some features of my own but allot of stuff is just plain copy paste.

Installing EGit into Eclipse

After downloading Eclipse (any version can be plugged with this feature) and start it go to preferences:

Select Install New Software. On the new screen type http://download.eclipse.org/egit/updates on the work with: TextBox.

Click Next and confirm your selection in the following window pressing Next again. Finally, accept the terms of license agreement and click Finish to start the installation. After the installation has finished, restart Eclipse to work with EGit.

EGit Configuration
Every commit in EGit will include the user's name and his email-address. These attributes can be set in the Preferences-window Window => Preferences. Navigate to Team => Git => Configuration and hit the New Entry... Button. Enter user.name as Key and your name as Value and confirm. Repeat this procedure with user.email and your email-address and click OK in the Preferences-window.

What else to do with this feature, this key-value pair?
Why not use it to store parameters for your workflow scripts? Here's some ideas.

• The locations of CSS and JS files to be minified
• Compilation output directory
• The latest version release number (if your not a tag fan)
• Feature branch meta data (owner, decription, etc.)
• A list of deployment servers

More on this here.

So this finishes the installation and setup of EGit on Eclipse (well not really because we still need to push files to the SVN server on this case GitHub and this requires configurations on both sides).

Next tutorials will be more interesting as I am describing some concepts of git that normally are confusing at the beginning.